BROADWAY 


Draiam^s 
esier  G^Honil 


rr  if 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 
LOS  ANGELES 


M- 


A  Broadway  Restaurant  after  the  Theatre 


BROADWAY 


"vf '     'ii,.'    i 


Trinity  Church 


BROADWAY 


BY 


J.  B.  Kerfoot 

DRAWINGS  BY 

LESTER  G.  HORNBY 


lonHon 
CONSTABLE  «fe  CO.   Limited 

BOSTON    AND    NKW    YORK 

HOUGHTON   MIFFLIN   COMPANY 
1912 


COPYRIGHT,    191  I 
BY  J.   B.    KERFCIOT   AND   LESTER   G.    HORNBY 


ALL    RIGHTS   RESERVED 


F 
ILLUSTRATIONS 


A    Broadway    Restaurant    after    the 

Theatre  Half-title 

Trinity  Church  Frontispiece 

A  Hansom,  Union  Square  i 

Broadway  from  Bowling  Green  7 

"HoKi-PoKi  Men,"  Union  Square  13 

Entrance  to  the  Old  Astor  House  19 

Up  Broadway  from  220  Street  23 

Broadway  from  Park  Row  29 

Lower  Broadway  from  City  Hall  Park  33 

In  the  Wholesale  District,  below  Union 

Square  37 

In  Madison  Square  43 


9B8304 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

Grace  Church  49 

Broadway  at  Union  Square  53 

A  Rainy  Evening  —  Madison  Square  57 

The  "  Flatikon  "   Building,    Broadway,    at 

Fifth  Avenue  6i 

Along  by  Martin's  65 

Just  above  Columbus  Circle  71 

At  Daly's  T7 

The  "Taxi"  Stand  at  Greeley  Square  81 

A     Freak      Racing      Model     near     "the  87 
Circle" 

Up  Broadway  from  Herald  Square  93 

Looking  up  Broadway  from  39TH  Street  97 

liKoADu Av  at  Times  Square  101 

Nursemaids  and  Chii.dkkn  at  io6th  Street  105 

Times  Square  —  Rector's,  Times  Building, 

1  1()Ti:i.  AsiOK  1 1 1 

vi 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

In  front  of  Hotel  Astor  115 

Up  Broadway  from   113TH  Street  121 

Broadway  at  Columbus  Circle  127 

The  "Peanut  Man,"  ii6th  Street  133 

The   Subway    Station    near   the  Ansonia, 

72D  Street  139 

The  Ansonia,  Broadway  and  720  Street         143 

An  Oriental  Bit — First  Baptist  Church 

AT  79TH  Street  147 

The     135TH    Street    End    of    the    "Dip," 

starting  at   120TH  Street  151 

At  104TH  Street  155 

The  Park  on  Broadway  at  io6th  Street       159 

A    Castle    between    Broadway    and    the 

Hudson — 1930  Street  163 

A  Suggestion  of  Spain  from  109TH  Street     167 

Doctor  Mulvey's  Dog  and  Cat  Hospital 

—  A  Relic,  at  Cathedral  Parkway  171 

vii 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

Looking  across  the  Hudson   from  Broad- 
way AT  ii6th  Street  175 

Columbia  College  from  Broadway  179 

Off  to  Albany  181 

A    Relic    of    Old    Broadway    near    1920 

Street  185 

The  "  Frankfurter  Man  "  189 

From  drawings  by  Lester  G.  Hornby 


A  Hansom^  Union  Square 


•^"5^-*" 


--...^V. 


BROADWAY 
I 

I  WAS  leaning,  one  afternoon,  on  the  stone 
rail  of  the  promenade-deck  affair  that  sur- 
rounds the  fifty-second  story  of  one  of  the 
downtown  office-towers,  looking  dreamily 
down  into  the  chasm  of  Broadway  — that  long 
narrow  cleft  in  the  plateau  of  skyscraper 
roofs  that  forms  the  Grand  Canon  of  lower 
Manhattan.  And  as  I  watched  the  sluggish 
stream  of  life  that  filled  the  far  bottom  of  the 
gorge,  a  man  alongside  of  me  volunteered  a 
remark. 

"  Gee !  "  he  said,  "  they  look  like  ants,  don't 
they?" 

Now  this  was,  or  at  least  it  had  every  out- 

3 


BROADWAY 
ward  appearance  of  being,  an  utterly  harm- 
less observation.  I  dare  say,  indeed,  that  had 
I  noticed  him  standing  there  or  seen  that  he 
was  approaching  the  conversational  boiling- 
point,  I  could  have  predicted  it.  But  I  was  day- 
dreaming, and  so,  momentarily,  in  that  con- 
dition of  mental  flaccidity  in  which  an  idea, 
like  a  microbe,  can  find  lodgment  in  one's 
psychological  system  and  work  unhindered 
havoc  there.  And  no  sooner  had  the  word 
*'  ants  "  left  my  unnoticed  neighbor's  lips  than 
I  found  myself  twelve  years  and  twelve  thou- 
sand miles  away,  sitting  on  the  broad  and 
shaded  porch  of  a  squat  inn  in  the  mountains 
of  Java,  watching  a  long  thin  line  of  ascend- 
ing and  descending  insects  that  stretched  from 
the  stone  floor,  diagonally  across  the  stuc- 
coed wall  to  a  crack  above  a  door.  The  line 
was  a  dozen  feet  long  and  in  width  perhaps  a 

4 


BROADWAY 
quarter  of  an  inch.  It  was  black  with  ants. 
From  dawn  to  dark  there  was  never  a  break 
in  the  toihng  procession.  And  although  by 
night  (more  than  once  I  had  brought  my  bed- 
room candle  out  to  see)  there  was  nothing 
doing  in  the  ant  world  and  no  dimmest  mark 
to  distinguish  their  beaten  road  from  the  blank 
wall,  by  day  there  seemed  never  a  change  in 
the  uncharted  route  the  procession  followed, 
and  no  stress  of  numbers,  no  congestion  of 
traffic,  ever  forced  the  travelers  on  that 
crooked  and  curving  highway  to  take  to  the 
adjacent  fields.  It,  too,  might  have  been  a 
street  lined  with  skyscrapers. 

But  the  amazing  part  of  the  spectacle,  the 
fantastic,  grotesque,  nightmarish  aspect  of  the 
thing,  upon  which  this  microbe  of  an  idea  fast- 
ened and  began  to  breed,  was  this  :  the  road 
that  these  thronging  insects  traveled  was  so 

5 


BROADWAY 
narrow  that  every  outgoing  ant  necessarily 
came  within  touching  distance  of  ever}^  home- 
comer  ;  and  every  meeting  resulted  in  a  chal- 
lenge. The  individuals  composing  the  host 
moved  by  jerks.  Two  steps  and  a  challenge 
—  three  steps  and  another  challenge  —  one 
step  and  another  challenge.  And  all  chal- 
lengings  were  conducted  under  parliament- 
ary rules.  Two  ants  stopped,  head  on.  They 
solemnl}^  rubbed  antennae.  They  paused  to 
consider  the  results.  Then  they  side-stepped 
with  a  sort  of  hurried  dignity  and  moved  on 
to  the  next  meeting. 

The  thing  had  fascinated  me  at  the  time. 
I  had  spent  hours  that  were  meant  for  siesta 
in  watching  the  show.  I  had  held  a  watch  on 
one  returning  member  of  the  colony  and  had 
found  that  it  took  him  some  eleven  minutes 
to  cover  the  twelve  feet  of  highway  and  that 

6 


Broadway  from  Boivlmg  Greefi 


BROADWAY 
he  held  over  two  hundred  interviews  on  the 
way.  I  had  racked  my  brain  to  discover 
whether  it  was  social  curiosity,  or  business 
interests,  or  military  precaution,  that  impelled 
them  to  the  performance ;  whether  it  was 
gossip,  or  instructions,  or  countersigns  that 
they  exchanged  at  those  palpitating  confabs. 
And  then  I  had  gone  away  and  forgotten 
it  all. 

And  now,  at  a  chance  word  from  an  un- 
noticed stranger,  it  all  came  back  to  me  and 
the  old  fascination  began  to  breed  a  new 
fantasy.  There,  five  hundred  feet  below  me, 
stretched  that  other  long  thin  line  that  was 
Broadway.  From  dawn  till  dark  —  and  after 
—  it,  too,  was  lined  with  ascending  and  de- 
scending insects.  Wiiat  if,  just  once,  one 
were  to  make  the  long  journey  up  that  crooked 
and  curving  highway,  challenging  every  hu- 

9 


BROADWAY 

man  ant  one  met,  stopping  him,  rubbing 
antennae  with  him,  sensing  the  sources  he 
derived  from,  the  ends  he  aimed  at,  the  in- 
stincts he  obeyed,  the  facts  he  bHnked,  the 
illusions  he  hugged,  —  getting,  in  short,  the 
essence  of  his  errand  ?  Suppose  one  covered 
the  dozen  miles  in  eleven  days  and  held  two 
hundred  thousand  interviews  by  the  way  ? 
Suppose,  when  one  reached  the  heights  of 
Harlem,  one  sat  down  and  took  stock  of  what 
one  had  learned  ?  Suppose  —  I  was,  I  think, 
a  trifle  drunk  from  the  fumes  of  the  imagined 
adventure.  I  forgot  the  man  who  liad  spoken 
to  me.  I  entered  the  elevator,  exploiting  the 
vision,  and  reached  the  sidewalk  still  wrapped 
in  dreams.  The  human  ants  were  out  in  force. 
A  score  of  them  were  bearing  down  on  me. 
I  laid  my  hand  on  the  arm  of  the  first  of 
them. 

10 


BROADWAY 

"Sir,"  I  said,  "are  you  a  native  of  this 
ant-hill  ? " 

I  never  pursued  the  adventure  in  its  origin- 
ally projected  form.  But  ever  since  that  after- 
noon's awakening,  when  I  Ve  walked  Broad- 
way, it  has  been  with  antenna?  extended. 


'■'■Hoki-Poki  Men^'  Union  Square 


II 


a:^i-i 


if- 


II 

THERE  is  nothing  in  the  world  so  uni- 
versal, so  potent,  so  impossible  to  disre- 
gard, and  so  difficult  to  define  as  personality. 
The  dictionary  —  that  brazenly  impudent 
beggar  of  pertinent  questions  —  assures  us 
that  it  is  "the  attributes,  taken  collectively, 
that  make  up  the  character  and  nature  of  an 
individual."  But,  as  usual,  we  know  better 
than  the  dictionary ;  although,  also  as  usual,  we 
should  get  into  hopeless  difificulties  if  we  tried 
to  prove  it.  For  the  dictionary  is  a  kind  of 
cuttlefish,  which,  when  closely  pressed,  emits 
an  inky  cloud  of  impenetrable  verbiage,  under 
cover  of  which  it  complacently  returns  to  its 
original  position.  However,  we  must  not  be 
too  hard  on  the  poor  dictionary ;  for  it  not  only 

15 


BROADWAY 
carries  on  an  enormous  business  on  a  hope- 
lessly inadequate  capital,  but  having  assumed 
the  frightful    responsibility  of  being   omni- 
scient it  cannot  afford  to  take  chances. 

But  personality  is  not  a  sum  in  arithmetic. 
It  is  something  much  more  closely  resembling 
a  phenomenon  in  physics. 

If  we  are  introduced  to  a  man  on  the  street- 
corner,  the  first  thing  that  we  are  aware  of  in 
regard  to  him  is  what,  for  want  of  a  better 
expression,  we  may  call  the  impact  of  his  per- 
sonality. And  though  we  may  never  see  him 
again,  and  may  forget  his  face  and  his  name 
and  the  circumstances  of  the  encounter,  it  is 
quite  possible  that  the  inarticulable  impression 
of  that  mysterious  emanation  maybe  recover- 
able in  our  consciousness  for  years.  He  may 
have  been  a  horse-thief  and  a  wife-beater,  a 
liar,  a  bunco-man,  and   an  oppressor  of  the 

16 


BROADWAY 

fatherless.  Yet  either  the  sum  total  of  these 
things  must  be  able,  on  occasion,  to  coalesce 
into  an  attractive  and  projectable  essence,  or 
else  the  personality  that  we  recall  with  pleas- 
ure was  something  independent  of  their 
synthesis. 

Moreover,  personality  is  not  confined  to 
what,  in  ordinary  weekday  English,  we  are 
used  to  calling  "individuals."  Animals  possess 
it.  Trees,  in  a  green,  vegetable  way,  are  en- 
dowed with  it.  Mountains  have  it.  Certainly 
no  wanderer  among  the  cities  will  dream  of 
denying  their  possession  of  the  gift;  and  he  is 
but  an  insensitive  plodder  along  the  sidewalks 
of  life  who  is  not  conscious  that  one  street 
differs  from  another  street  in  personality  as 
one  star  differs  from  another  star  in  glory. 

But  personalities  —  especially  those  of 
streets  —  are  kittle-cattle.  They  are  at  once 

17 


BROADWAY 

saucy  and  elusive.  They  elbow  us  at  cross- 
ings. They  grin  up  at  us  from  the  cobbles. 
They  laugh  down  at  us  from  the  sky-signs. 
They  beckon  us  from  the  thick  of  the  traffic, 
and  pretend  to  take  shelter  in  the  shadows 
of  doorways.  They  sometimes  twiddle  tan- 
talizing thumbs  at  us  from  the  eyes  of  urchins 
and  again  appear  to  perch  perkily  upon  the 
shoulders  of  policemen.  But  when  we  have 
painstakingly  beaten  the  bush  of  all  these 
coverts,  they  are  not  there. 

They  are,  in  sober  truth,  abstractions  ;  and 
after  the  manner  of  their  kind,  they  presume 
upon  their  advantages.  One  would  need  the 
brazen  self-confidence  of  the  dictionary  itself 
to  think  that  one  could  walk  boldly  up  to  one 
of  these  radiant  intangibilities,  throw  a  cun- 
ning noose  of  words  over  its  head,  lead  it 
triumphantly  home,  and  exhibit  it  as  a  trophy 

18 


Entrance  to  the  Old  Astor  Home 


<'r'^\L  .- 


BROADWAY 
of  the  chase.   And  yet  in   all  the  realm  of 
sport  there  is  no  more  alluring  game  than 
hunting  them. 

Only  (and  as  we  are  going  hunting  to- 
gether the  point  cannot  be  too  carefully  em- 
phasized )  the  necessary  tactics  are  a  trifle 
odd.  One  can  neither  stalk  a  personality  nor 
(a  method  sometimes  only  too  successful 
with  lions)  induce  one  to  stalk  us.  Stealth 
is  wasted  and  strategy  is  of  no  avail.  Much 
less  is  it  possible  by  sustained  pursuit  to  bring 
such  a  quarr}^  to  bay.  It  is  only  by  being 
both  careless  and  careful;  by  always  going 
loaded,  yet  never  carrying  a  gun ;  b}^  often 
seeming  mad  as  any  hatter,  yet  always  hiding 
a  bit  of  method  in  our  noddles ;  by  loitering 
purposively  in  unlikely  places  in  a  mood 
happy-go-luckily  compounded  of  opportun- 
ism and  haphazardness ;  by  never,  even  for  a 

21 


BROADWAY 
moment,  forgetting  what  we  are  after  and 
seldom,   even   to   ourselves,   acknowledging 
what  we  are  doing,  that  we  can  hope  —  but 
let  us  get  on  the  ground. 


up  Broadivay  from  22d  Street 


Ill 


■,'i;V/!iii!''M<'ff;i  H 

(ft    -i^-l 


'^  SS^A'^i&'wi'-^  1  ^''t^" 


^tinr 


vVi.W,gB^ 


^iw 


Ill 

SOMEWHERE  aloHg  back  in  fifteen  hundred 
and  fifty  odd,  a  globe-trotting  burgher 
from  that  watertight  compartment  in  the 
North  Sea  which  is  known  as  Holland  brought 
some  tulip  seeds  home  with  him  from  Con- 
stantinople, and  thereby  earned  the  right, 
although  his  name  has  been  forgotten  and  no 
tablet  to  his  memory  will  ever  be  erected  by 
any  American  society  of  Holland  dames,  to 
figure  as  the  authentic  forefather  of  Broad- 
way. 

For  those  few  tulip  seeds  (one  imagines 
them  sharing  the  capacious  pockets  of  his 
square-tailed  coat  with  a  Turkish  phrase- 
book  and  a  flask  of  hollands)  in  due  time  be- 
came tulips.    And  these,  having   gladdened 

25 


BROADWAY 
the  eyes  of  our  traveler's  fellow  countrymen, 
bred  other  tulips.  And  these  not  only  bred 
others  still,  but  went  intoxicatingly  to  the 
heads  of  a  people  whom  no  amount  of 
schnapps  had  ever  thus  affected.  So  that  soon 
there  was  no  square-tailed  coat  in  all  the  Low 
Countries  so  poor  that  its  pockets  held  no 
seeds.  And  before  long  about  half  of  the 
bottom  of  that  watertight  compartment  was 
sown  to  tulips.  And  the  exchanges  took  to 
listing  new  varieties  of  that  watered  stock. 
And  men  speculated  on  margin  in  October 
bulbs  and  sold  March  tulips  short.  And 
finally,  what  with  tending  red  and  yellow 
tulips  by  day  and  dreaming  of  blue  ones  by 
night,  the  very  noses  of  the  nation  took  on 
a  flowery  hue,  and  throughout  Europe  a 
Dutchman  was  recognizable  by  his  bulbous 
build. 

26 


BROADWAY 

And  thus  it  came  about  that  when,  in  1 626, 
the  Dutch  East  India  Company  sent  Peter 
Minuit  out  to  estabhsh  the  trading-post  of 
New  Amsterdam,  it  was  less  of  set  purpose 
than  by  a  sort  of  racial  instinct  that,  just  be- 
hind the  rear  gate  of  his  little  fort,  he  planted 
the  unconsidered  bulb  of  Bowling  Green  from 
which  has  sprung  the  amazing  stalk,  Broad- 
way. 

Good  old  Peter !  He  wore,  one  likes  to 
think,  a  leathern  belt  some  cubits  in  circum- 
ference, with  several  snickersnees  stuck  in 
it;  and  beneath  the  brim  of  his  imposing  hat 
there  dwelt  a  pair  of  eyes  that  knew  a  bar- 
gain when  they  saw  one.  But  when  (doubt- 
less protesting  that  the  natives  were  bank- 
rupting him  by  their  rapacity )  he  paid  over 
his  sixty  guilders  worth  of  jimcracks  and  took 
the  title-deeds  to  Manhattan  Island,  he  little 

27 


BROADWAY 
suspected  the  fertility  of  that  rocky  soil  or 
guessed  what  a  Jack-and-the-beanstalky  plant 
was  destined  to  take  root  in  his  back  yard. 
And  while  the  plant  has  grown  beyond  cal- 
culation, and  bears  flowers  and  fruit  that  the 
wisest  Burbank  in  all  Amsterdam  would 
never  have  dared  prophesy,  we  have  only  to 
look  down  from  the  windows  of  any  of  the 
modern  skyscrapers  that  hem  it  in,  to  see  that 
there,  at  the  base  of  all  the  fevered  activity 
and  plodding  hopelessness  and  gay  unconcern 
of  its  long,  twisted,  and  knotted  stem,  that 
little  bulb  still  quiescently  reposes  in  simple 
symmetry  and  vegetating  calm. 

It  is,  I  think,  the  quietest  spot  in  all  New 
York,  and  the  most  restful  —  once  you  have 
gotten  into  its  good  graces.  But  it  is  not  — 
like  some  of  thewistfully  reminiscent,  shabby- 
genteel,  manifestly  come-down-in-the-world 

28 


Broadway  from  Park  Row 


»<J-  «f : 


M  f' 


BROADWAY 
little  squares  that  are  to  be  met  with  here 
and  there  in  the  city  —  easy  to  get  acquainted 
with. 

Some  of  these  fairly  beg  you  to  come  and 
sit  with  them.  And  when,  from  sheer  pity  or 
out  of  passing  curiosity,  you  linger  for  a 
moment  on  their  warped  benches  or  lean 
against  their  rusty  fences,  they  whisper  to  you 
that  it  seems  like  old  times  to  see  an  American 
face  again,  and  that  as  for  gloves  and  a  walk- 
ing-stick,—  why,  dear,  dear,  they  remember, 
years  ago,  —  and  they  confidentially  point 
out  doorways  whose  colonial  fan-lights  now 
hang  askew  and  whose  slender  pilastered 
frames  are  smirched  and  broken  ;  and  they 
croon  in  the  ear  of  your  imagination  about 
chignons  and  cashmere  shawls  and  black 
stocks  and  crinolines  and  the  vanished  world 
that  once  —  before  Ireland  began  to  empty  or 

31 


BROADWAY 

Italy  to  unite  and  when  Lithuania  was  but  a 
name  —  came  and  went  and  Hngered  deco- 
rously of  balmy  evenings  along  the  path  where 
that  little  Dago  girl  with  the  bright  eyes  and 
the  dirty  face  is  now  minding  the  baby. 

But  it  is  not  thus  with  Bowling  Green. 
Shabby  it  may  be  and  somewhat  out  at  el- 
bows ;  but  neither  wistfulness  nor  an  appeal 
for  sympathy  are  to  be  detected  in  its  bearing. 
If  there  are  any  advances  to  be  made,  they  '11 
come  from  you.  And  be  very  sure  that  it  has 
its  own  way  of  dealing  with  people  that  carry 
guidebooks  and  stare  open-mouthed  at  its  one 
rakish  sycamore  tree  and  its  Ashless  fishpool 
and  ask  suspicious  questions  of  it  with  an  air 
of  being  antiquarians.  It  answers  them  not  at 
all.  Or,  worse  still,  it  grumbles  noisy  insults 
at  them  in  its  deep  subway  voice  and  clangs 
its  circling  cable-gongs  in  their  ears,  and  bids 

32 


Lower  Broadway  from  City  Hall  Park 


BROADWAY 
them  read  the  grandiloquent  inscription  on 
the  base  of  its  De  Peyster  statue  and  begone 
about  their  business.  Some  day,  if  you  feel  in 
a  sardonic  mood,  go  down  and  watch  the  ex- 
pressions on  their  baffled  faces. 

But  if  you  are  one  of  those  to  whom  this 
little  parklet's  immersion  in  turmoil  only 
serves,  in  certain  moods,  to  enhance  its  aloof- 
ness, then  to  you,  when  it  has  come  to  know 
you,  it  will  offer  an  isle  of  refuge,  a  place  of 
withdrawal  and  of  self-communing,  a  sort  of 
sanctuary  of  silence  in  a  war  of  sound.  For 
you,  too,  bit  by  grudging  bit,  it  will  consent 
to  reveal  its  secrets.  And  for  those  whom  it 
thus  favors  it  keeps  a  special  bench  (it  stands 
just  behind  the  news-stand  by  the  subway  en- 
trance), from  which,  without  losing  sight  of 
the  bit  of  magic  sky  reflected  in  the  fountain 
basin,  they  can  just   manage  to  look  around 

35 


BROADWAY 

the  corner  of  the  hill  into  the  defile  of  Broad- 
way. And  sometimes,  as  they  look,  they  will 
find  the  clamor  of  the  surrounding  streets 
withdraw  itself  from  hearing  and  become  but 
the  rumble  of  the  present  echoing  back  into 
the  silence  of  its  source.  And  then,  by  a  mere 
half-turn  of  the  mind's  eye,  they  will  find 
the  past  close  beside  them. 

Let  us  sit  there  for  a  moment.  For  even  on 
Broadway  the  past  has  some  significance. 

We  are  apt,  when  we  think  at  all  of  the  early 
Dutch  village  of  New  Amsterdam,  to  think  of 
it  as  sitting  squatly  and  peak-roofedly  on  the 
tip  of  the  island,  with  its  back  to  the  bay  and  its 
whitewashed  face  turned  expectantly  toward 
the  future  city.  But  of  course,  as  a  matter  of 
fact,  it  did  nothing  of  the  sort.  It  faced  the 
shore  and  gave  only  so  much  heed  to  the 
hinterland  of  swamp  and  hill  behind  it  as  to 

36 


In  the  IV hole  sale  District^  below  Union  Square 


ijl  It  ^'  u 


BROADWAY 

bethink  it  of  building  a  palisade  at  its  back,  in 
order  that  it  might  sleep  undisturbed  by  fear 
of  raids  organized  in  the  woods  that  are  Wall 
Street.  For  even  in  1626  the  idea  of  selling 
a  property  to  outsiders  and  then  freezing  out 
the  new  management,  having  a  receiver  ap- 
pointed and  effecting  a  reorganization,  was  not 
unknown  in  these  latitudes. 

Outside  this  first  palisade  and  at  the  foot  of 
the  hill  that  still  slopes  up  from  Bowling 
Green  lay  an  open  space  that  was  called  "The 
Plain."  I  have  called  it  Peter  Minuit's  back 
yard.  It  could  not,  however,  even  aspire  to 
that  reflected  dignity;  for  it  was  the  place 
where,  had  the  early  seventeenth  century 
afforded  such  commodities,  the  empty  cans 
and  discarded  woven-wire  mattresses  of  the 
community  would  have  been  bestowed ;  and 
it  was   not   until  the  little  town,  spreading 

39 


BROADWAY 

back  from  the  harbor  at  the  foot  of  Broad 
Street,  had  scattered  a  few  shanties  along  the 
eastern  side  of  this  Common,  and  the  new 
fort  of  1635  had  given  a  touch  of  fashion  to 
its  southern  edge,  that  the  most  imaginative 
optimist  in  the  garrison  began  to  see  any 
possibiUties  in  it.  Then — first  indication  of  the 
boom  to  be  —  a  grant  was  made  to  Burgo- 
master Martin  Cregier  of  "land  for  a  house 
and  garden  lying  north  of  the  fort."  But  even 
so,  Martin  waited  seventeen  years  before  he 
built.  And  then  —  "The  Plain"  having  in 
the  mean  time  become  "The  Market  Field," 
and  Martin  having  doubtless  interviewed  the 
plain  clothes  representative  of  the  Man  across 
the  Way  —  the  Burgomaster  built,  not  a 
"  house  and  garden,"  but  a  tavern. 

Perhaps  the  Governor,  playing  bowls  on 
his  newly  graded  lawn  behind  the  new  fort, 

40 


BROADWAY 
took  to  dropping  in  on  Martin  between  games. 
Presumably  the  court  followed  his  example. 
At  any  rate,  the  Burgomaster  soon  came  to 
be  recognized  as  the  Delmonico  of  his  day; 
and  it  was  not  long  before,  if  you  had  asked 
him,  he  would  have  told  you  that  his  tavern 
stood  at  the  beginning  of  De  Heere  Straat  — 
the  Great  Highway. 
The  bulb  had  sprouted. 


In  Madison  Square 


IV 


IV 

THERE  is  always  a  certain  temptation  to 
the  biographer  to  multiply  anecdotes  of 
his  hero's  childhood. 

It  would  be  pleasant  to  sit  at  ease  in  Bowling 
Green  and  recall  the  divine  naivete  of  an  in- 
fantile Broadway  that  could  still  pride  itself, 
as  late  as  1737,  upon  its  business  sagacity  in 
getting  four  hundred  and  seventy-five  dollars 
for  the  corner  of  Exchange  Place. 

It  would  be  interesting  to  note  and  to  spec- 
ulate upon  the  tavernly  tenacity  of  Meinherr 
Cregier's  freehold,  whereon  the  King's  Arms 
succeeded  the  original  establishment ;  which 
in  its  turn  became  Burns's  Coffee  House; 
which  same,  after  seeing  many  sights  and 
passing  under  many  aliases,  was  still  in  evi- 
dence as  the  Atlantic  Garden  as  late  as  i860. 

45 


BROADWAY 

It  would  be  entertaining  to  disentangle  the 
threads  of  the  Aneke  Jans  affair,  and  see  how 
a  worthy  dame  of  early  New  Amsterdam,  by 
marrying  two  husbands  and  a  riverside  plan- 
tation, became,  if  there  is  any  truth  in  affi- 
davits, the  ancestress  of  about  ten  per  cent  of 
the  population  of  America ;  bequeathed  to  her 
descendants,  share  and  share  alike,  in  fee- 
simple  and  in  perpetuity,  an  undivided  interest 
in  an  imaginary  claim  against  Trinity  Parish ; 
and  thus  not  only  put  hope  into  thousands  of 
the  hopeless,  even  to  this  day,  but  furnished 
lucrative  employment  for  the  lawyers  of  ten 
generations. 

We  might  even  manage  (a  thing  to  which 
the  best  of  us  are  not  averse)  to  discover  one 
of  those  quietly  ironic  jokes  that  Fate  seems 
to  be  so  fond  of  perpetrating,  apparently  for 
her  own  exclusive  enjoyment.   Do  you  see 

46 


BROADWAY 
that  towering  pile  of  steel  and  stone  at  26 
Broadway  ?  It  is  the  home  of  the  Standard 
Oil.  It  is  the  centre  of  the  web.  It  is  the  point 
of  vantage  upon  which,  for  so  many  years,  a 
gaunt  old  spider  of  finance  stood,  benignly 
somnolent,  yet  always  ready  (after  the  im- 
memorial manner  of  spiders)  so  violently  to 
shake  his  taut  fabric  of  silky  threads  that  no 
attorney-general  of  them  all  could  either 
make  out  the  design  of  their  construction  or 
put  his  finger  on  the  spider.  Yet  once,  mod- 
estly displayed  on  the  lower  right-hand  corner 
of  a  visiting-card,  the  number  26  Broadway 
revealed  the  place  where  Alexander  Hamilton 
lay  awake  at  night  excogitating  the  fiscal 
policy  of  a  new  Republic,  and  never  seeing, 
for  all  his  sagacity,  a  warning  in  the  symbolic 
fact  that  the  oil  in  his  midnight  lamp  was  fur- 
nished by  a  whale. 

47 


BROADWAY 

But  our  business  with  the  past  is  not  of  this 
gossipy  and  hobnobbish  nature.  We  are  come 
to  interview  it,  not  to  visit  it.  We  have  called 
it  up,  not  to  listen  to  its  reminiscences,  but  to 
ask  it  a  question. 

Broadway,  even  to  an  unfamiliar  and  casual 
visitor,  is  amazingly  abrupt  and  apparently 
arbitrary  in  its  transitions.  It  never  seems  to 
alter  by  degrees,  but  always  to  change  by 
jerks.  One  section  of  it  never  seems  to  melt 
into  another  section,  but  always  to  flounce 
into  it.  Those  of  us,  too,  who  have  known  it 
long  realize  that  though  it  sometimes  alters, 
almost  overnight,  the  whole  character  and 
contents  of  one  of  these  divisions,  it  is  un- 
alterably persistent  in  retaining  its  lines  of 
transitional  demarcation.  We  are  come  to 
ask  the  past  to  tell  us  why. 

Again  Broadway,  even  to  the  senses  of  the 
48 


Grace  Chuy-ch 


BROADWAY 
same  unfamiliar  and  casual  visitor,  differs  from 
the  other  streets  and  avenues  of  New  York  in 
something  beside  its  greater  length,  its  more 
varied  life,  and  the  larger  number  of  its  tall 
buildings  and  electric  lights.  It  differs,  too, 
quite  as  manifestly  from  the  chief  thorough- 
fares of  all  other  American  cities,  and  the  dif- 
ference is  equally  unstateable  in  terms  of 
statistics.  We  are  come  to  the  past  to  ask  if 
it  can  give  us  any  clue  to  the  nature  of  this 
difference.  Let  us  see  what  it  has  to  say. 

In  Martin  Cregier's  day  De  Heere  Straat 
ran  to  the  new  palisade  that  the  growing  town 
had  built  in  1653  on  the  line  of  Wall  Street. 
Beyond  the  gates  and  as  far  as  what  is  now 
Park  Row  it  was  also  a  traveled  road  and 
was  known  as  De  Heere  Wegh.  But  there, 
instead  of  showing  any  sign  of  pushing  on  into 
the  country  on  the  line  of  its  future  course, 

51 


BROADWAY 

it  ended  abruptly  at  the  new  Common  (or 
"The  Fields,"  as  the  some-day-to-be  City 
Hall  Park  was  at  first  called ) ,  and  turned  its 
scanty  traffic  over  to  the  Bowery  Lane.  It  had 
come  up  like  a  weed,  no  man  foreseeing  it.  It 
grew  like  a  weed,  no  man  tending  it.  And  to 
all  contemporary  appearances  it  stopped  like 
a  weed  when  it  had  got  its  growth. 

New  Amsterdam  became  New  York.  New 
York,  for  a  few  months,  changed  hands  and 
name  again  and  became  New  Orange.  Once 
more,  and  this  time  for  good,  the  city  took 
its  present  name.  And  still  no  one  seemed 
to  dream  but  that  the  stretch  of  highway  that 
had  come  to  be  called  Broadway  was  com- 
plete as  it  stood.  Indeed,  so  firmly  was  this 
notion  fixed  in  the  public  mind  that  when,  in 
1760,  the  city  fathers  laid  out  what  is  now 
Broadway  between  Vesey  and  Duane  Streets, 

52 


Broadivay  at   Union  Square 


^r! 


^■f*,  •  ^^ 


4    ^^^ 


BROADWAY 

the  extension  was  not  even  recognized  for 
what  it  was,  but  was  called  Great  George 
Street.  And  it  was  only  when  the  Revolution 
was  over  and  house-cleaning  patriots  were 
busy  changing  <*  Crown  "  Street  to  *' Liberty  " 
and  "King"  Street  to  "Pine,"  that  it  oc- 
curred to  some  one  that  "  Great  George  " 
Street — objectionable  name —  might  be  got- 
ten rid  of  by  calling  it  Broadway. 

But  even  this  does  not  seem  to  have  dis- 
turbed in  the  least  the  public's  conviction  that 
Broadway  was  not  a  growing  organism,  but 
a  given  quantity.  Great  George  Street,  dur- 
ing the  thirty  years  following  its  christening, 
had,  with  some  pauses  for  breath,  labori- 
ously climbed  the  hill,  to  the  north  of  which, 
and  on  the  present  line  of  Canal  Street,  a 
little  stream  crossed  from  the  Collect  Pond 
to  the  Lispenard  Meadows  and  the  Hudson 

55 


BROADWAY 
River.  During  the  Revolution  the  British  had 
built  a  stone  bridge  across  this  creek  to  con- 
nect the  fortifications  they  had  thrown  up  on 
the  hills  at  both  sides  of  it.  And  now,  taking 
quick  advantage  of  this  convenience,  Broad- 
way was  soon  stretching  out  toward  a  sandy 
lane  that  ran  from  the  little  settlement  at  the 
head  of  the  Bowery  to  Greenwich  Village  — 
the  present  Astor  Place.  But  did  anybody 
recognize  it  ?  Not  a  soul.  It  was  known,  even 
oflficially,  as  *'  The  Middle  Road."  And  it 
was  not  till  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth 
century  that  it  seems  to  have  been  generally 
realized  that  the  street  which  ended  against 
the  fence  of  the  Sailors'  Snug  Harbor  grounds 
was  Broadway,  now  finally  after  many  years 
arrived  at  its  full  growth.  The  weed  had 
stolen  another  march  on  the  gardeners. 
But  now  a  somewhat  noteworthy  event 
56 


A  Rainy  Evening  —  Madison  Square 


'■  J_.-,r*->^>-^:  - 


BROADWAY 
occurred.  People  had  for  some  time  been  talk- 
ing of  the  advisability  of  mapping  out  the 
whole  upper  part  of  Manhattan  Island,  so  that, 
as  the  city  grew  northward,  there  would  be  a 
predetermined  and  symmetrical  plan  for  de- 
velopment to  follow.  In  1807  a  commission 
was  appointed  to  give  this  idea  effect,  and 
in  1820  they  submitted  a  plan,  which  was 
approved  and  which  has  been  pretty  closely 
adhered  to.  But  first  a  bit  of  preliminary 
clearing-up  was  undertaken.  The  gardeners 
became  suspicious  of  the  weed  and  determined 
to  cut  off'  its  head. 

The  oldest,  and  indeed  for  long  years  the 
only,  thoroughfare  leading  from  early  New 
York  to  the  outer  world  was  the  Bowery- 
Bloomingdale-Eastern  Post  Road.  It  was  to 
this  highway  that  the  traffic  of  De  Heere 
Wegh   had   been  diverted   when   the  latter 

59 


BROADWAY 
stopped  at  <'The  Fields."  It  was  to  this  high- 
way that  the  traffic  of  "The  Middle  Road  " 
was  turned  over  through  the  lane  at  Astor 
Place.  It  was  into  this  ancient  and  honorable 
highway  that  it  was  now  proposed  to  lead 
Broadway  and  so  get  rid  of  it  forever.  A  way 
was  opened  for  it  through  the  property  of 
the  Sailors'  Snug  Harbor  Foundation.  A  twist 
was  given  it  at  what  is  now  the  intersection 
of  Tenth  Street,  and  it  was  headed  for  the 
Bloomingdale  Road  at  about  Sixteenth  Street 
and  the  matter  dismissed  as  settled. 

But,  as  we  have  had  occasion  to  see  in  our 
own  day,  Broadway  is  a  plant  that  refuses  to 
be  topped.  New  York  awoke  one  morning 
along  in  the  thirties  and  discovered  that  the 
Bloomingdale  Road  had  disappeared  and  that 
Broadway  bloomed  in  its  stead.  And  with  the 
complacent  acceptance  of  the  accomplished, 

60 


The  '■'■Flatiron  "  Buildings  Broadway^  at  Fifth  Avenue 


iitn^'^ 


BROADWAY 
and  the  refusal  to  learn  from  past  misjudg- 
ments,  that  have  always  characterized  New 
York's  attitude  toward  this  most  self-willed 
of  its  creatures,  it  was  immediately  seen  that 
Broadway  naturally  and  inevitably  ran  to 
Fifty-ninth  Street  and  also  that  it  naturally 
and  finally  ended  there. 

The  matter  touches  our  own  times.  It  is 
only  a  year  or  so  ago  that  we  saw  Eighth 
Avenue  run  into  Columbus  Circle  from  the 
south  and  run  out  of  it  toward  the  north; 
saw  Fifty-ninth  Street  run  into  it  from  the 
east  and  out  of  it  toward  the  west ;  saw  Broad- 
way run  into  it  cat-a-corner  and  the  Bou- 
levard run  out  of  it  askew;  —  and  drew  no 
inferences.  Yet  how  self-evident  the  truth 
became  when  the  signs  were  changed  on  the 
lamp-posts  !  And  if  to-day  you  will  examine 
a  map  of  the  Greater  City  you  will  see  where 

63 


BROADWAY 
Broadway,  the  last  vestige  of  its  Fabian  pol- 
icy thrown  aside,  has  literally  knocked  St. 
Nicholas  Avenue  to  one  side,  stolen  its  right 
of  way,  gobbled  the  poor  old  King's  Bridge 
Road  (which  the  house-cleaning  patriots  of 
'94  forgot  to  rechristen),  and  thus  for  the 
first  time  under  its  own  name  has  made  its 
way  into  the  open.  They  say  it  ends  at 
Albany. 

And  now  that  we  have  run  our  fingers 
down  the  index  of  history,  let  us  see  if  we 
can  find  an  answer  to  our  questions. 

For  one  thing,  it  is  fairly  evident  why, 
even  to-day,  De  Heere  Straat  is  dimly  differ- 
entiable  from  De  Heere  Wegh.  Also  why 
Great  George  Street  has  something  more 
than  its  habit  of  dealing  in  typewriters  and 
sporting-goods  to  mark  it  off  from  those  sec- 
tions of  the  lower  street  that  had  a  hundred 

64 


Along  by  Martin  s 


BROADWAY 
years  the  start  of  it.  Also  that  the  sudden 
sense  of  having  reached  the  New  Jerusalem, 
which  one  is  conscious  of  when  one  walks 
north  across  Canal  Street,  may  owe  its  sud- 
denness less  to  the  sharply  drawn  clannish- 
ness  of  race  than  to  the  persisting  tradition 
that  the  Middle  Road  was  an  independent 
entity.  And  it  is  perhaps  little  to  be  won- 
dered at  that  this  habit  of  developing  by  sec- 
tions has  been  maintained  when  we  see  how 
conveniently  the  stretches  from  Astor  Place 
to  Union  Square,  from  Seventeenth  Street 
to  Twenty-third,  from  Twenty-third  Street  to 
Thirty- fourth,  from  Thirty-fourth  Street  to 
Forty-second,  and  from  Forty-second  Street 
to  the  Circle  have  lent  themselves  to  its  con- 
tinuance. 

As  for  the  other  question,  if  history  does 
not  answer  it  categorically,  it  at  least  hints 

67 


BROADWAY 
at  its  solution.  We  were  <'warm,"  as  the 
children  say,  when  we  likened  Broadway  to 
a  weed  in  a  garden ;  for  it  is  evidently  in  spite 
of  the  gardeners  and  not  through  their  care 
that  Broadway  has  grown  up  and  come  into 
its  own.  Fifth  Avenue  was  planted.  Broad- 
way *'just  growed."  But  we  should  be 
warmer  yet,  I  fancy,  if  we  Hkened  the  dif- 
ference between  Broadway  and  other  thor- 
oughfares to  that  difference  —  not  at  all  one  of 
degree  and  yet  not  flatfootedly  one  of  kind  — 
that  subsists  between  the  domesticated  duck 
and  the  canvasback ;  or,  better  still,  to  that  be- 
tween the  pedigreed  cat  on  the  hearth  and  its 
striped  relative  in  the  jungle.  Pennsylvania 
Avenue  and  Halsted  Street  are  by  Geometry 
out  of  Foresight.  Broadway  is  fera  iiaturce. 
That  is  why,  from  no  matter  what  cross- 
street  you  emerge  on  no  matter  what  part  of 

68 


BROADWAY 

its  course,  some  dim  ancestral  instinct  in  you 
stirs  as  though  it  recognized  its  enemy  or  its 
prey.  If  you  come  of  the  timid  tribes,  —  if 
your  totem  is  the  hare  or  the  horse,  —  you 
tremble  imperceptibly,  like  your  prototypes 
at  the  track  of  a  bear.  If  you  come  of  tougher 
breed,  —  if  the  boar  hound  is  the  sign  of  your 
house,  —  the  hackles  of  your  mind  make 
ready  to  bristle. 

It  is  the  taint  of  the  untamed. 


yust  above  Columbus  Circle 


V 


^    *^   ... 


■".:,. ''"'U!?.^ 


i 


V 

IN  the  last  analysis  I  suppose  that  we  are 
all  either  statisticians  or  impressionists. 

Half  of  us,  when  face  to  face  with  a  pheno- 
menon, ask  that  the  counting-machines  of  our 
minds  be  furnished  with  items  to  add.  The 
rest  of  us  seek  a  symbol  to  prime  the  pumps 
of  our  imaginations. 

Personally,  I  am  free  to  confess  that  the 
most  incalculable  orgies  of  calculation  are  use- 
less for  the  purpose  of  arriving  at  an  answer 
to  the  lower  reaches  of  Broadway.  The  aver- 
age of  millionaires  to  the  acre ;  the  price 
of  land  per  square  foot ;  the  number  of 
stories  in  the  latest  tower;  the  population  of 
the  largest  office  building ;  the  distance  that 
the  steel  girders  of  the  district  would  stretch, 

73 


BROADWAY 

end  to  end,  toward  the  moon ;  —  are  all  equally 
amazing  and  equally  meaningless  to  me.  Like 
Alice,  who  could  n't  tell  the  Red  Queen  how 
much  one  and  one  and  one  and  one  and  one 
made,  I  cannot  do  addition.  I  cannot  even  do 
differential  calculus.  I  think  that  I  must  be 
an  impressionist. 

At  any  rate,  it  was  by  accident  that  I  first 
stumbled  upon  one  of  the  guarded  secrets  of 
Lower  Broadway  —  a  place  that  I  had  long 
accepted  as  merely  the  central  passage  of  the 
financial  hive,  banked  on  both  sides  by  serried 
ranks  of  cells  where  golden  honey  was  stored, 
and  busy  workers,  to  the  humming  of  a 
million  telephones  and  the  buzzing  of  ten 
thousand  tickers,  fed  baby  Trusts  on  yellow 
pollen. 

Like  other  would-be  wise  men  who  like 
to  tickle  their  own  fancies  by  playing  hide- 

74 


BROADWAY 
and-seek  with  ironies,  and  think  to  catch  that 
shy  bird  that  we  call  the  Trend  of  the  Times 
by  putting  a  pinch  of  salt  on  its  tail,  I  had 
more  than  once  (remembering  that  from  the 
forgotten  epochs  at  the  back  of  beyond  men 
have  always  expressed  their  aspirations  by  the 
spires  that  they  built)  nodded  my  head  sagely 
on  seeing  from  the  Jersey  shore  or  from  the 
decks  of  ferries,  how  rapidly  the  modest 
steeples  of  an  earlier  ideal  were  disappearing 
behind  the  tower  of  the  Sewing  Machine,  the 
white  pharos  of  Life  Insurance,  the  battle- 
ments of  "City  Investments  "  and  of  "Syn- 
dicate." I  had  even  thought  to  have  caught 
Fate  once  more  at  her  practical  joking  at  that 
spot,  halfway  between  Bowling  Green  and 
the  City  Hall,  where  from  the  bottom  of  a 
square  opening  some  hundreds  of  feet  in 
depth  Old  Trinity  (like  Truth  from  the  bot- 

75 


BROADWAY 
torn  of  her  well )  points  an  ineffectual  finger 
at  a  forgotten  heaven.  And  when  I  made  pil- 
grimage (as  who  that  loves  beauty  and  hopes 
to  die  does  not)  to  her  little  city  of  the  dead, 
I  sometimes  remembered  that  once  a  year, 
when  darkness  lends  her  a  false  horizon,  and 
silence  and  a  glint  of  snow  among  the  graves 
conspire  to  hide  the  existence  of  the  actual,  a 
few  men  with  memories  and  many  more  with 
tin  horns  gather  to  hear  her  chimes  (that were 
cast  to  ring  out  the  keynote  of  eternity)  play 
guard-mount  for  the  years.  For  the  rest, 
they  tell  time  for  Wall  Street. 

But  one  da}^  I  happened  to  miss  an  early 
train  at  a  downtown  ferry,  and  so,  by  way 
of  killing  time,  wandered  at  eight  o'clock  on 
a  Sunday  morning  up  the  river  to  tlie  crest 
of  the  Island  and  found,  to  my  absurd  sur- 
prise, that  Broadway  was  tenantless. 

76 


At  Daly's 


BROADWAY 

I  once  blundered  into  the  abandoned  bed 
of  a  Western  river ;  a  deep,  dim  gorge  which, 
in  the  long  ago,  it  had  washed  and  swirled 
and  sucked  and  scoured  among  the  sandstone 
hills  and  subsequently  deserted  for  a  shorter 
course  through  rougher  country.  Green 
things  filled  the  bottom  of  it  and  high,  water- 
worn  walls  shut  it  in.  It  was  weirdly  quiet 
and  uncannily  remote.  And  if  one  peered  be- 
hind the  bushes  that  grew  against  its  sides, 
one  came  upon  hollow-sounding  caves  that 
Leviathan  might  have  nested  in,  and  saw 
small  moss-grown  cubbies  ranged  in  rows 
from  which  mere  minnows  might  once  in 
safety  have  made  faces  at  their  enemies. 

Broadway  was  like  that. 

One  noticed  that  there  were  trees  in  Trin- 
ity Churchyard.  One  heard  tugs  puffing  in 
the  harbor.   At  the  cavernous  door  of  one  of 

79 


BROADWAY 
the  great  office  buildings  a  shirt-sleeved  jan- 
itor sat  tilted  back  in  a  wooden  chair.  On  the 
corner  of  Wall  Street  two  policemen  stood 
gossiping  at  the  junction  of  their  beats.  A 
quartet  of  Italian  girls  with  baskets  on  their 
arms  hurried  chattering  toward  the  Battery 
wharfs  on  some  picnic  quest.  And  down  the 
utterly  deserted  roadway  from  the  north  a  sin- 
gle motor-cyclist  came  whirHng  unrebuked 
at  forty  miles  an  hour.  The  rest  was  sun- 
shine and  silence. 

But,  strange  to  say,  the  place  had  no  air  of 
a  deserted  city.  It  did  not  seem  —  as  Fifth 
Avenue  seems  late  at  night,  or  as  the  Strand 
seems  in  the  short  hour  of  abandonment  that 
comes  to  it  before  the  dawn  —  a  thing  useless 
because  unused,  or  lifeless  because  swept 
clean  of  human  life.  Deserted,  it  took  on  se- 
renity. Unused,  it  developed  meanings  above 

80 


The  "  Taxi  "  Stand  at  Greeley  Square 


BROADWAY 
its  uses.    It  was  not,  as  I  would  have  sup- 
posed,  an   empty   mart.    It  was    become   a 
temple  from  which  the  money  changers  had 
been  driven  out. 

And  later,  as  I  crossed  the  Hudson  and 
looked  back  at  the  fairy  city  that  upreared 
itself  against  the  morning,  I  quietly  dropped 
overboard  my  cynic's  similes  and  satiric  sym- 
bols of  interpretation. 

I  forget  how  many  wonders  of  the  world 
have  been  added  to  the  classic  seven.  But  I 
am  certain  that  Lower  Broadway  has  become 
the  latest  member  of  this  Cyclopean  family. 
From  a  feverishly  busy  street,  whose  inclos- 
ing rows  of  cast-iron  and  brown-stone  facades 
fully  served  and  adequately  expressed  the  life 
that  filled  it,  it  has,  before  the  uncompre- 
hending eyes  of  a  single  generation  and 
through  the  ragged  stages  of  a  Brobdingnagian 

83 


BROADWAY 
growth,  evolved  into  something  at  once  inde- 
pendent of  the  men  that  made  it  and  infinitely 
greater  than  the  sum  of  all  its  parts.  A  few 
decades  since,  it  was  a  congested  thorough- 
fare in  a  large  city.  A  few  years  ago,  it  was 
an  uncoordinated  congery  of  architectural 
high  tumbling.  To-day,  a  hundred-turreted 
whole,  it  towers  to  heaven  in  indissoluble 
solidarity. 

Only  the  intensely  passionate,  basically 
vital,  self-unconscious  aspirations  of  man- 
kind have  thus  uniquely  phrased  themselves  in 
stone.  The  Egyptian  passion  for  permanency 
was  the  architect  of  the  Pyramids.  The  Greek 
passion  for  perfection  built  the  Parthenon. 
The  fiery  faith  of  the  Middle  Ages  flamed 
into  the  Gothic  cathedrals.  The  as  yet  un- 
self-cognizant  passion  of  twentieth-century 
America  has  reared  the  skyline  of  Lower 

84 


BROADWAY 
Broadway.     It   is  not  a   by-product  of  our 
modernity.    It  is  the  self-forecasting  monu- 
ment of  what  we  mean  to  be. 


A  Freak  Racing  Model  near  "  the  Circle''' 


VI 


VI 

ONE  of  the  problems  involved  in  always 
putting  one's  best  foot  forward  is  the 
difficulty  of  keeping  one's  worst  foot  always 
behind  without  involving  the  penalty  of  stand- 
ing still. 

Sleight-of-hand  gentlemen,  magicians,  and 
wizards  of  sorts  break  this  seeming  dead- 
lock by  the  simple  trick  of  distracting  the 
minds  and  deflecting  the  attention  of  their 
audience  during  the  crucial  moment  required 
for  the  protruding  of  the  cloven  hoof ;  and 
Broadway,  which  we  have  seen  to  be  no  bun- 
gHng  amateur  in  prestidigitation,  has  worked 
out  its  own  bit  of  by-play  for  covering  its 
escape  from  this  dilemma. 

Our  mothers,  in  their  youth  (your  grand- 
89 


BROADWAY 

mothers,  my  dears,  if  you  happen  to  be  well 
under  thirty) ,  did  their  shopping  at  Broadway 
and  Chambers  Street  or  in  the  fashion-haunted 
region  round  Canal.  They  found  it  an  easy 
walk  from  their  homes  in  Worth  and  Broome 
Streets,  or,  if  they  came  of  conservative  stock 
and  looked  disdainfully  upon  that  earlier 
Upper  West  Side,  from  their  family  mansions 
in  Maiden  Lane  and  John  Street.  But  to-day, 
if  you  should  do  so  strange  and  unlikely  a 
thing  as  to  walk  resolutely  north  from  where 
the  City  (as  they  would  say  in  London)  ends, 
—  that  is  to  say,  from  where  St.  Paul's  Chapel 
turns  its  back  upon  the  National  Park  Bank 
and  has  been  forgotten  for  its  pains,  and 
where  the  Astor  House,  hke  a  dejected  old 
man,  sits  with  its  gray  head  sunk  between  its 
shabby  shoulders  and  with  a  stubbly  growth 
of  tawdry  shops  beneath  its  chin, — you  would 

90 


BROADWAY 

scarcely  have  passed  the  sunken  garden  of 
the  City  Hall,  where  Justice,  after  holding  her 
scales  out  in  the  face  of  Newspaper  Row  for  a 
generation,  recently  fell  over  exhausted,  before 
you  'd  find  yourself  in  an  unknown  region. 

This  is  sometimes  spoken  of  (there  are  al- 
ways people  who  think  to  solve  the  riddle  of 
the  universe  by  mentioning  the  Nebular  Hy- 
pothesis) as  the  Wholesale  District.  And  it 
in  so  far  justifies  this  appellation  in  the  eyes 
of  the  uninitiated  who  wander  into  it  that  the 
show-rooms  along  its  sidewalks  seem  full  of 
things  for  sale  by  the  gross  that  no  conceiv- 
able human  would  ever  think  of  buying  by 
the  piece,  —  the  wire  ghosts  of  misbegotten 
hats  ;  unlikely  looking  undergarments ;  bolts 
of  anemic  fabrics  with  hectic  flushes  on  their 
unhealthy  cheeks;  gardens  of  desperately  ar- 
tificial flowers  ;  exotic  feathers  from  birds  that 

91 


BROADWAY 

never  flew  on  land  or  sea  ;  strange  cliques  and 
sordid  gatherings  of  tinsel  trimmings,  poison- 
ous passementerie,  impossible  insertion  and 
lanklaces.  And  if  you  raise  your  eyes,  signs  are 
not  wanting  to  suggest  that  the  ten  lost  tribes 
of  Israel  have  at  last  emerged  from  hiding. 

From  the  south,  men  in  search  of  card- 
index  systems,  typewriters,  burglar-proof 
safes,  firearms,  and  railroad  transportation 
occasionally  penetrate  this  region  as  far  as 
Canal  Street.  From  the  north,  women  in 
search  of  bargains  sometimes  venture  in  as 
far  as  Astor  Place.  The  intervening  mile  is 
teira  incognita. 

How  does  it  come  that,  beyond  a  dim,first- 
class-in-history  sort  of  notion  that  Niblo's 
Garden  once  stood  on  the  corner  of  Prince 
Street,  and  that  some  one,  we  forget  who,  has 
told  us  that  bridge  prizes  —  or  was  it  boys' 

92 


up  Broadxvay  from  Herald  Square 


f  M   W 


BROADWAY 
socks  —  were  to  be  had  for  next  to  nothing  at 
Charles  Broadway  Rouss's,  and  that  both  of 
these  places  were  located  somewhere  in  the 
hiatus  between  up  town  and  down,  we  have 
but  an  instinctive,  time-and-space  conception 
of  this  district?  It  is  owing  to  the  fact  that 
Broadway  the  Conjuror  (in  order  to  keep  us 
from  noticing  that  immediately  behind  that 
magnificently  shod  *<  best  foot "  that  it  puts 
so  bravely  forward  trails  a  "worse  foot," mal 
chausse  to  the  point  of  dilapidated  uppers  and 
protruding  toes)  has  so  arranged  matters  that 
between  the  City  Hall  and  Fourteenth  Street 
is  where  all  New  Yorkers  who  travel  by  the 
surface  cars  read  the  morning  papers  on  their 
way  downtown  and  the  evening  papers  on 
their  way  back. 

It  was  an  old  Hebrew  patriarch  who,  by 
offering  me  a  simple  lesson  in  geography,  first 

95 


BROADWAY 

furnished  me  with  a  clue  to  the  understand- 
ing of  this  motley  middle  region  where  Broad- 
way, in  its  salad  days,  had  been  the  Middle 
Road.  I  spied  him  from  a  car  window  —  a  fine 
old  figure  in  a  coat  once  black,  but  now  gone 
green,  with  white  beard  and  hair,  and  the 
far-focused,  infinitely  patient,  yet  remorse- 
less eyes,  that  one  always  thinks  of  as  be- 
longing in  the  Sanhedrin,  but  only  sees,  now- 
adays, in  the  heads  of  occasional  sellers  of 
shoestrings  or  suspenders  on  the  crowded 
sidewalks  or  among  the  teeming  barrows  of 
New  York's  East  Side.  And  because,  with  no 
appearance  of  being  on  alien  territory,  he  was 
walking  down  Broadway  wheeling  a  baby- 
carriage  filled  with  rolls  of  old  matting  and 
the  rusted  and  broken  remnants  of  a  cook- 
stove,  I  jumped  out  and  followed  him. 

He  was  a  model  for  an  old  master;  a  study 

96 


Looking  up  Broadway  from  jgth  Street 


BROADWAY 

for  the  stage ;  a  sight,  one  would  have  said,  to 
stop  the  traffic.  Yet  none  turned  to  look  at 
him,  and  for  blocks  not  so  much  as  a  cocked 
eyebrow  or  a  crooked  smile  greeted  his  pa- 
tient progress. 

It  has  always  been  a  matter  for  wonder  to 
me  that  so  few  dwellers  in  modern  Manhattan 
avail  themselves  of  the  privilege  afforded  them 
of  making  a  tour  of  the  world  for  ten  cents. 
Any  train  on  the  Second  Avenue  Elevated 
will  put  you  down  at  Rivington  Street,  in  the 
heart  of  Russian  Poland  ;  there  are  no  octroi 
stations  on  the  frontier  of  Hungary,  a  few 
blocks  north;  and  a  short  w'alk  on  Hester 
Street  will  bring  you  to  the  streets  of  Naples, 
from  which  it  is  equally  easy  to  go  east  to 
China  or  south  by  west  to  Syria.  But  while  I 
had  thought  that  I  knew  my  East  Side  like  a 
book,  as  the  phrase  goes  (shall   we  ever,  I 

99 


BROADWAY 
wonder,  have  a  book  as  starkly  human  as  the 
East  Side  ?),  I  had  unconsciously  come  to  look 
upon  it  as  a  remote  region,  self-contained, 
bounded  by  the  Bowery,  and  separated  from 
the  purlieus  of  Broadway  by  I  knew  not  what 
buffer  states  of  dignified  commerce.  And 
when  my  old  patriarch,  turning  east  on 
Prince  Street,  unexpectedly  led  me  by  a  few 
short  byways  to  a  familiar  junk-shop  in  Rus- 
sian Jewry,  I  realized  that  not  only  had  the 
world  once  again  proved  smaller  than  I 
thought  it,  but  that  in  the  heat  of  shrinking  it 
had  given  off  an  explanation. 

The  amazing  motley  of  Broadway  from 
Canal  Street  north  was,  after  all,  nothing  in  it- 
self. It  was  just  the  East  Side  showing  through. 
It  was  simply  the  chemical  discoloration  of  its 
retaining  walls  by  the  fermenting  medley  of 
mixed  races  that  seethed  and  boiled  behind 

100 


Broadway  at  Times  Square 


^X^^ 


■■d¥^"f^*'  -1:11 


>¥fsl#"" 


1  vsT'-  ,'fi;*-  llA.:;,^-.fef'^sa^ 


u4 


BROADWAY 
them.  And  as  I  made  my  way  back  to  it,  I 
was  busy  picturing  this  strange  street  to  my- 
self as  continuously  throughout  its  length 
nothing  in  itself,  but  simply  a  sluiceway  whose 
retaining  walls  were  a  succession  of  such  seep- 
ings  and  discolorations.  And  as  the  picture 
grew  and  was  filled  in,  as  I  realized  that  no- 
where from  the  Battery  to  the  Bronx,  neither 
in  the  financial  centre,  nor  in  the  wholesale 
district,  nor  in  the  jobbing  regions,  nor  in  the 
shopping  quarter,  nor  in  the  theatre  circle, 
nor  in  any  of  the  successive  hotbeds  of  great 
hotels,  were  the  activities  of  the  city  mainly 
housed  upon  its  sidewalks,  I  began  to  glimpse 
another  of  the  elusive  secrets  of  Broadway.  I 
knew  at  last  how  it  came  about  that  to  those 
who  know  it,  Broadway  is  always  seeming  to 
hold  the  semblance  of  all  things,  yet  ever 
proving  to  hold  the  substance  of  none;  how, 

103 


BROADWAY 
being  everything  by  inference,  it  is  yet  no- 
thing by  actuahty.  I  understood  at  last  its 
inexhaustible  capacity  to  be  all  things  to  all 
men  while  being  forever  unable  to  be  every- 
thing to  any  man  who  is  not  either  a  local 
counter-jumper  or  a  wastrel  at  large. 


N^urse maids  and  Children  at  lo6th  Stret'i 


VII 


liM^V'  ■■ 


VII 

I  ONCE  saw  an  Italian  peasant  woman,  fresh 
landed  from  the  steerage  and  dressed 
in  all  the  fete-day  regalia  of  her  native  pro- 
vince, chase  a  Broadway  car  for  half  a  block 
in  front  of  the  Post-Office,  and,  catching  up 
with  it  from  behind  when  it  stopped  at  Park 
Place,  and  failing  to  notice  the  entranceway 
for  such  cases  made  and  provided,  grasp  the 
brake-handle  of  the  rear  platform,  throw  a 
sturdy,  red-stockinged  leg  over  the  rail,  and 
swing  herself  aboard  with  the  satisfied  air  of 
having  successfully  surmounted  the  first  diffi- 
culty of  a  new  country. 

Broadway  smiled,  collected  her  fare,  and 
went  on  about  its  business.  It  does  not,  as  a 
rule,  impress  one  as  having  much  time  for 
foolishness. 

107 


BROADWAY 

We  often  hear  it  stated  that  it  is  the  longest, 
and  the  busiest,  and  the  most  spectacular,  and 
the  most  spendthrift,  and  the  most  modern 
thoroughfare  in  the  world.  Sometimes  the  au- 
thors of  these  statements  jump  out  at  us  like 
highwaymen,  crying,  *'Your  admiration  or 
your  life !  ''and  pointing  the  declaration  at  us  like 
a  blunderbuss.  Sometimes,  like  professional 
beggars,  they  ply  us  with  persuasive  details, 
hoping  that  we  will  drop  an  exclamation  of 
wonder  in  their  hats.  They  never  tell  us  — 
perhaps  they  never  noticed —  that  Broadway 
the  spectacular  and  ultra-modern,  the  busy 
tender  of  a  hundred  irons  in  as  many  fires  and 
the  inconstant  discarder  of  old  loves  for  new 
affinities,  is  also  in  an  unobtrusive  sort  of  way 
something  of  a  sentimentalist.  Hidden  in  one 
of  its  many  pockets  it  always  has  a  crumbling 
four-leaved  clover,  a  dying  rose,  or  a  fading 

108 


BROADWAY 
ribbon  that  it 'shows  occasionally  to  those  who 
were  its  cronies  during  the  progress  of  that 
particular  affair.  The  fact  that  it  never  car- 
ries the  same  souvenir  for  long  is  another  mat- 
ter. Let  those  who  think  themselves  entitled 
to  do  so,  pass  judgment  on  that. 

Does  anyone  know  just  when  it  was  that 
the  old  woman  who  used  to  sell  white  rabbits 
with  pink  eyes  at  Easter-time,  water-lilies  in 
mid-June,  and  vari-colored  puppies  at  other 
seasons,  disappeared  from  her  post  between 
Nineteenth  and  Twentieth  Streets  on  Broad- 
way? With  her  has  gone  most  of  what  sur- 
rounded her,  and  her  going  was  perhaps  the 
cue  for  those  invisible  scene-shifters  whose 
work,  unnoticed  in  the  doing,  is  to  dismantle 
the  stage  and  prepare  the  new  settings  for 
the  successive  acts  of  Broadway's  progressive 
comedy. 

109 


BROADWAY 

For  years,  just  south  of  the  main  doorway 
of  Lord  and  Taylor's,  she  sat  on  some  invis- 
ible support  close  to  the  ground.  The  shawl 
that  bound  her  head  and  was  pinned  under  her 
chin  added  its  folds  to  the  ample  draperies 
of  her  comfortable  skirts,  and,  blending  with 
the  brown  iron  walls  behind  her  and  the  gray 
stone  beneath,  half  enveloped  and  half  re- 
vealed the  clothes-basket  or  washtub  that  held 
her  wares.  From  her  ruddy  face  two  cheery 
eyes  looked  out  at  a  now  vanished  world  of 
belles  in  bustles  and  gallants  in  "skin-tight" 
trousers,  innocent  of  creases.  There  was  no 
gasoline  in  the  air  she  breathed ;  and  all  day 
long  smart  victorias  and  landaulettes  and  shiny 
carriages,  with  plum-colored  liveries  on  the 
box  and  horses  in  jingly  harness,  drew  up 
in  front  of  her.  And  all  that  was  middle-aged 
and  fashionable  and  haughty,  and  all  that  was 

110 


Times  Square  —  Rector  s^  Times  Building,  Hotel  Astor 


BROADWAY 

young  and  gay  and  debonair,  in  the  life  of  the 
city  of  the  da}^  passed  her  unheeding  at  close 
range  or  stopped  to  laugh  into  each  other's 
answering  eyes  while  pretending  to  pet  a 
puppy. 

Does  anybody  know  just  when  she  disap- 
peared ? 

Three  blocks  to  her  left  the  Fifth  Avenue 
Hotel  marked  the  boundary  beyond  which, 
unless  it  was  to  scuttle  round  the  corner  to  a 
matinee  at  Palmer's  Madison  Square  Theatre, 
no  self-respecting  female  ever  ventured  to  be 
seen.  Park  and  Tilford's  was  near  b}^;  and 
Arnaud's,  which  had  ministered  to  genera- 
tions that  knew  not  Huyler.  Morrison's  stood 
at  her  right  hand.  Gorham's  glittered  a  few 
feet  away.  The  sign  of  Cypher  —  cryptic 
name  once  fraught  with  half-mysterious  sug- 
gestions of  an  esoteric  cult  for  the  antique  — 

113 


BROADWAY 

glowed  up  at  her  from  the  eastern  corner  of 
Seventeenth  Street.  Across  from  this,  Jacques 
and  Marcus  decked  their  windows  hke  the 
Queen  of  Sheba;  while  beyond  Whiting's, 
Tiffany's  hid  its  glories  behind  a  dignified 
reserve  and  kept  the  southern  gateway  of 
its  world  against  the  barbarians  of  Fourteenth 
Street. 

Does  anybody  know  just  when  she  disap- 
peared ? 

Already  there  are  thousands  who  pass  the 
empty  red-brick  building  at  the  Nineteenth- 
Street  corner  who  do  not  know  but  that  Gor- 
ham's  was  born  and  brought  up  at  Thirty- 
sixth  Street  and  Fifth  Avenue.  Already  there 
are  thousands  to  whom  the  names  of  Isaacs 
and  of  Simon  on  Tiffany's  old  iron  building 
carries  no  hint  of  irony.  Already  deft  putters- 
together  of  two  and  two,  who  happen  to  visit 

114 


hi  front  of  Motel  Jstor 


'^      ¥> 


ai«-'-  ••-■•!;'■. 


i 


fw^ 


"  ■      '      .      Ill 


VHF 


BROADWAY 

the  adjacent  stretches  of  Fifth  Avenue  be- 
tween twelve  and  one  o'clock  at  noon,  when 
they  discover  that  what  they  had  taken  to  be 
an  international  convention  of  labor-unions 
just  adjourned  or  a  mass  meeting  of  the  alien 
unemployed  waiting  to  be  called  to  order  is 
nothing  but  a  few  of  the  clothing- factory  and 
sweat-shop  workers  of  the  region  taking  the 
air  and  a  cigarette  after  lunch,  may  think  that 
they  can  read  the  fortune  of  near-by  Broad- 
way in  the  ten  thousand  bowler  hats,  the  ten 
thousand  wagging  tongues,  and  the  twenty 
thousand  gesticulating  hands  of  that  assem- 
blage. 

And  for  the  most  part,  even  to  the  rest  of 
us,  the  pathetic  plight  of  this  once  palpitating 
stretch  of  highway,  now  plainly  moribund, 
though  still  breathing  the  last  gasps  of  its  fash- 
ionable incarnation,  is  a  negligible  incident, 

117 


BROADWAY 
even  if  noticed.  For  one  of  the  many  things 
that  we  Americans  have  as  yet  found  no  time 
to  practice  is  the  luxurious  indulgence  of  re- 
grets. We  let  the  dead  past  bury  its  dead,  if 
it  be  so  minded ;  or,  more  likely  still,  leave  the 
ceremony  to  foreigners.  And  Broadway  is 
the  most  insouciant  of  us  all. 

But  sometimes,  especially  on  wintry  after- 
noons when  hurrying  faces  are  muffled  in 
furs  and  the  lights  in  the  shop  windows  make 
brave  play  on  such  satins  and  jewels  as  are 
left,  some  of  us  feel  a  tug  at  our  heartstrings 
in  walking  from  Union  Square  to  the  Flatiron. 
And  then,  if  we  are  quick  to  understand  its 
sign  language,  we  know  that  Broadway  is  tell- 
ing us  that  it  still  remembers.  And  we  realize 
that  whatever  new  keepsake  it  may  be  cher- 
ishing the  next  time  we  share  its  confidence, 
for  the  present  tlie  blocks  between  Seven- 

118 


BROADWAY 

teenth  Street  and  Twenty-second  are  the 
sprig  of  rosemary  that  it  is  carrying  —  for  re- 
membrance. 


Up  Broadway  from  Ifjth  Street 


VIII 


^'  ^^^L, 


1 


VIII 

THE  Japanese  have  an  engaging  legend 
about  a  company  of  blind  men,  who, 
happening  for  the  first  time  upon  an  elephant, 
enthusiastically  undertook  to  investigate  the 
nature  of  the  beast.  One  of  them  threw  his 
arms  about  a  hind  leg.  One  of  them  got  hold 
of  its  trunk.  One  of  them,  by  standing  on  tip- 
toe, managed  to  grasp  its  tail.  One  borrowed 
a  ladder  and  so  got  a  grip  on  an  odd  ear.  Sub- 
sequently they  came  to  blows  over  discrepant 
conclusions. 

Similarly,  there  are  some  field-naturalists 
who  are  thoroughly  convinced  that  Broadway 
is  a  creature  of  exclusively  nocturnal  habits. 
Their  observations,  indefatigably  prosecuted 
but  ultra-specialized,  have  led  them  to  believe 

123 


BROADWAY 
that  it  lies  up  during  the  day,  stirs  and  stretches 
itself  languidly  in  the  gloaming,  and  only 
rouses  to  full  activity  after  dark.  If,  along 
about  dusk,  you  find  leisure  to  stand  for  a 
while  on  the  little  stone  island  of  safety  that 
lies  between  the  headland  of  the  Worth  Mon- 
ument and  the  promontory  of  the  Flatiron 
and  provides  a  port  of  refuge  for  timid  navi- 
gators in  those  troubled  waters,  you  will  easily 
come  to  understand,  perhaps  for  a  time  even 
to  share,  this  erroneous  but  widely  credited 
theory. 

All  afternoon  the  traffic  of  Twenty-third 
Street  has  fretted  for  the  whistle  or  poured 
itself  across  Fifth  Avenue ;  the  quadruple  line 
of  motor  vehicles  on  the  latter  thoroughfare 
has  alternately  stopped  and  started  at  the  busy 
crossing;  and  the  poor  Broadway  cars,  almost 
unnoticed,  have  been  content  to  make  their 

124 


BROADWAY 

way  diagonally  between,  as  occasion  offered. 
Now  there  is  a  gradual  dying-down  of  this 
confusion.  Twenty-third  Street  is  shutting  up 
shop.  Fifth  Avenue  is  lighting  its  double  row 
of  close-set  lights  and  going  home  to  dinner. 
The  Flatiron  is  becoming  shadowy.  At  last 
the  Metropolitan  Tower,  that  for  half  an  hour 
has  been  getting  more  and  more  like  a  great 
white  ghost,  calmly  hangs  its  clock,  full-moon- 
wise,  in  the  east  and  lights  its  peaceful  planet 
in  the  zenith.  The  show  seems  to  be  over  for 
the  day. 

But  as  you,  too,  turn  to  leave,  you  notice  in 
the  north  four  hanging  ropes  of  lights  —  so 
like  the  ropes  of  stars  that  parachute  rockets 
let  down  when  they  burst,  that  you  almost  see 
them  wave  in  the  wind.  And  as  you  look,  the 
lights  become  letters,  and  the  letters  form 
themselves  into  words,   and  the  words  are 

125 


BROADWAY 
HOFFMAN  and  VICTORIA  and  CAFE  MAR- 
TIN and  BRESLIN.  And  below  these  fire- 
works and  beyond  them,  you  see  a  glare  as 
of  a  conflagration,  and  hear  a  murmur  like  a 
County  Fair.  And  then,  "By  George!  "  you 
say  to  yourself,  *'I  believe  the  naturalists  are 
right."   And  you  follow  the  crowd. 

Unhappily  (can  one  draw  out  leviathan 
with  a  hook?)  one  cannot  put  that  glowing 
spectacle  into  words,  or  paint  the  electric 
fairyland  where,  high  above  the  happy  crowd, 
huge  white  kittens  wave  exultant  tails  while 
tangling  endless  miles  of  crimson  silk,  and  all 
the  Kings  and  Queens  of  Table  Waters  hold 
their  courts  by  sparkling  fountains,  and  gigan- 
tic boxers  deal  each  other  phantom  blows,  and 
ghostly  winds  blow  blazing  skirts  across  the 
sky.  One  can  only  walk  and  look  and  tell 
one's  self  that  after  all  Broadway  begins  at 

126 


Broadway  at  Columbus  Circle 


BROADWAY 

Twenty-third  Street  and  ends  at  Longenecker 
Square,  and  sleeps  by  day  and  comes  to  life 
at  sundown ;  and  that  when,  in  daylight,  we 
had  thought  it  restlessly  alive,  all  its  grunts 
and  twitchings  were  but  dreams,  and  only 
proved  that  like  a  dog  before  the  fire  it  was 
chasing  rabbits  in  its  sleep. 

And  yet  it  is  not  so  many  years  ago  that 
little  knots  of  people  used  to  gather  nightly 
in  newly  christened  Herald  Square  to  watch 
the  glowing  eyes  in  the  heads  of  the  Herald 
owls  wink  solemnly  at  each  minute  as  it  crept 
by ;  and  if  you  stopped  and  listened,  you  could 
hear  little  sighs  of  satisfaction  go  up  from  the 
watchers  at  each  repetition  of  the  miracle.  In 
those  days  Broadway,  while  something  of  a 
somnambulist,  was  not  considered  a  noc- 
turnal animal.  To-night,  as  you  pass  that 
way,  you  will  see  that  even  the  fiery,  hurtling 

129 


BROADWAY 
horses  of  Ben  Hur's  chariot  can  only  win 
passingly  uplifted  glances  from  the  crowded 
sidewalks. 

Whence  comes  this  transformation  ?  Has 
the  leopard  changed  its  spots  ?  Is  it  true,  as 
some  would  have  it,  that  history  is  repeating 
itself  with  variations,  and  that  the  spirit  of 
Imperial  Rome  has  transmigrated  into  the 
American  body  politic  ?  Or  is  it  only  that  the 
dynamo  has  been  perfected  ?  Or  that  Psy- 
cholog}^  has  turned  advertising  agent  ? 

Believe  me,  it  is  something  infinitely  sim- 
pler and  more  natural.  Have  you  ever  ex- 
tended your  natural  history  studies  to  the 
firefly?  If  not,  you  probably  regard  it  as  a 
kind  of  entomological  fluffy-ruffies  that  sleeps 
the  clock  around  in  order  to  go  joy-riding  by 
acetylene  lanterns  in  the  evening.  As  a  mat- 
ter of  fact,  it  is  a  little,  long,  narrow,  shabby, 

130 


BROADWAY 
and  somewhat  awkward  beetle,  very  busy 
about  its  everyday  concerns  by  daylight.  In 
its  larval  stage  it  shows  faint  glimmerings  of 
phosphorescence  on  its  body.  Later,  when 
the  first  promptings  of  passion  stir  its  little 
veins,  it  flies,  when  its  daily  tasks  are  done,  to 
hang  its  lamp  of  love  above  the  meadow. 

Broadway,  too,  is  long,  and  narrow,  and 
sometimes  shabby,  and  always  very  busy  in 
the  daytime.  In  its  larval  stage  it  used  to  burn 
a  little  kerosene  of  evenings. 

Lately  it  has  come  into  its  own. 


The  ^'■Peanut  Man"  Il6th  Street 


IX 


m^ 


•"-r     t^^^  I  It"    ^p 


IX 

LUKE  BUSHEE  was  (and,  if  it  please  the 
Great  Spirit,  still  is)  a  Chippewa  Indian 
with  a  few  drops  of  coureurs  de  hois  blood  in 
his  copper  veins,  who  lived  near  the  shores 
of  Lake  Nepigon  and  drove  the  dryest  of 
birch-bark  canoes  through  the  whitest  water 
of  that  celestial  wilderness.  Luke's  idea  of  a 
metropolis  was  a  little  village  on  the  Cana- 
dian Pacific  Railway  which  consisted  of  the 
railroad  station,  the  agent's  bungalow,  a 
Hudson's  Bay  Company  Post,  a  few  shanties, 
and  a  place  of  occasional,  and  chiefly  liquid, 
refreshment  known  as  a  hotel.  Yet  no  cos- 
mopolite, proud  of  his  savoir  vivre,  whom  I 
ever  met  and  talked  with,  has  shown  a  more 
instinctive  knowledge  of  the  formula  for 
dining  well  on  Broadway. 

135 


BROADWAY 

It  was  on  my  first  trip  with  Luke  and  we 
had  been  out  some  days.  During  the  last  of 
these  there  had  been  unmistakable  signs  in 
the  air  that  the  ice  of  aboriginal  reserve  was 
by  the  way  of  breaking  up.  And  finally, 
under  the  influence  of  evening  and  a  roaring 
fire,  the  last  barriers  gave  way  and  Luke 
asked  a  question. 

"You  live  in  New  York?" 

"  Yes,  Luke." 

'«  You  know  Ba'tis'  Michell  ?  " 

"No,  I  don't  think  I  ever  heard  of  him." 

Silence  for  several  minutes.  Then,  with 
the  subtle  rising  inflection  of  incredulity,  — 

"You  live  in  New  York?" 

"  Yes,  Luke." 

"You  not  know  Ba'tis'  Michell?" 

"  No,  Luke  ;  I  never  heard  of  him." 

"Huh!  — tha's  funny." 
136 


BROADWAY 

And  then,  with  the  quiet  satisfaction  of 
one  who  convicts  you  out  of  your  own 
mouth  of  arguing  yourself  unknown,  — 

"  He  's  the  cook  at  the  hotel." 

Now  when,  in  1659,  Martin  Cregier  built 
his  tavern  behind  the  fort,  not  to  have  known 
the  cook  at  the  hotel  would  indeed  have 
argued  one  an  obscure  and  inconsiderable 
citizen.  Luke's  point  of  view  can  at  least 
make  us  reahze  the  human  reality  of  New 
Amsterdam.  But  even  though  we  laugh  at 
the  twentieth-century  absurdity  of  it,  it  is 
not,  perhaps,  so  far-fetched  as  it  appears. 
There  are  still  circles  within  which  not  to 
know  the  cook  at  the  hotel  is  to  confess 
one's  self  a  gastronomic  philistine  and  a  so- 
cial outcast. 

Snobbery?  Not  for  a  moment.  Simple  self- 
defense.  How  else  shall  most  of  us  bear  to 

137 


BROADWAY 

see  our  brothers  enjoying  the  dehghts  that 
we  have  forfeited  the  abihty  to  enjoy  except 
by  calhng  them  names?  Did  not  Father 
Adam,  when  he  had  been  expelled  from 
Eden  and  saw  the  animals  still  innocently 
disporting  there,  think  for  the  first  time  to 
call  them  "brutes"?  If  you  have  inadver- 
tently eaten  of  the  tree  of  the  knowledge  of 
good  and  evil,  only  a  pull  will  give  you  a 
good  dinner  on  Broadway.  You  can  dine 
there,  yeoman ly,  for  the  price  of  a  Bock — 
if  you  know  where  and  have  a  nodding  ac- 
quaintance with  the  man  behind  the  lunch- 
counter.  Or  you  can  dine  there,  ro3^ally,  for 
the  price  of  a  silk  doublet — if  you  know 
where  and  send  your  card  to  3^our  fellow 
sovereign  behind  the  arras.  See  to  it  that  it 
bears  the  arms  of  the  United  States  and  has 
a  yellow  back. 

138 


The  Subwax  Station  near  the  Ansonia,  J  2d  Street 


BROADWAY 

Otherwise  —  well,  otherwise  you  must  have 
kept  your  curiosity  unsated  by  the  world,  and 
have  preserved  the  native  innocence  which 
believes  that  to  pay  is  to  receive,  that  fine 
ceilings  make  tender  birds,  and  that,  epicu- 
reanly  speaking,  the  French  can  do  no  wrong, 
if  you  would  not  wander  on  Broadway  at 
dinner-time  like  a  Peri  barred  from  Paradise. 

Ah,  yes,  my  dear  sir,  I  can  see  what  you 
are  thinking  by  the  quizzical  angle  of  those 
little  wrinkles  at  the  corner  of  your  eyes. 

*'  Kissing  and  deviled  kidneys,"  you  would 
tell  me,  "go  by  favor  the  world  over." 

*' It  is  not  necessary,"  you  are  sa3nng  to 
yourself,  "to  walk  me  past  the  Imperial  and 
the  Saint-Denis,  Louis  Martin's  and  the 
Knickerbocker,  Rector's  and  the  Hotel  As- 
tor,  the  Empire  and  the  Marie  Antoinette, 
the  Ansonia  and  Breton    Hall,  in  order  to 

141 


BROADWAY 

point  out  to  me  the  tricks  of  trade  that  Broad- 
way has  borrowed  from  the  world  at  large 
and  performs  more  gorgeously  than  some, 
if  more  brazenly  than  most." 

I  know  it  perfectly,  my  dear  fellow.  And 
it  is  not  for  that  that  I  ask  you  to  glance  in 
at  all  those  happy  faces,  —  something  like 
three  miles  of  them,  —  glowing  with  the  joy 
of  dreams  come  true,  that  evening  and  open 
windows  display  between  Twenty-third  Street 
and  the  upper  Eighties.  It  is  in  order  that, 
w^hile  they  are  still  fresh  in  your  recollection, 
I  may  whisper  in  your  ear  the  truth  about 
Broadway. 

There  used  to  be  an  old  Frenchman  who 
kept  an  unacknowledged  restaurant  in  a  lost 
corner  of  that  part  of  Westchester  County 
that  is  now  the  Borough  of  the  Bronx;  and 
a  good  many  years  ago  two  young  men  who 

142 


The  Jfisonia^  Broadivay  and  J  2d  Street 


^vSiM." 


BROADWAY 
had  heard  rumors  of  his  Old-World  manners 
and  Gascon  cooking,  and  who  were  at  the 
age  that  seeks  feverishly  for  adventures  and 
fails  to  recognize  them  when  found,  devoted 
a  college  holiday  to  seeking  him  out. 

At  first,  somewhat  to  their  annoyance,  he 
demurred  at  the  idea  of  admitting  them;  ex- 
plaining that  he  did  not  keep  a  place  of  pub- 
lic entertainment,  but  merely,  on  occasion, 
exercised  his  skill  for  the  benefit  of  his  ac- 
quaintances. In  the  end,  however,  possibly 
touched  by  the  naive  disappointment  and  em- 
barrassed silence  of  his  visitors,  he  relented ; 
and  having  ushered  them  into  a  sort  of  vine- 
grown  arbor  back  of  his  house,  he  discussed 
most  graciously  with  them  the  toothsome 
details  of  their  meal.  And  he  ended  by  say- 
ing, «*And  now.  Messieurs,  what  will  you 
have  to  drink.?" 

145 


BROADWAY 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  they  had  not  thought 
to  drink  at  all.  But  they  tried,  with  I  fear  a 
rather  transparent  show  of  off  handedness,  to 
conceal  this  fact  by  saying  that  they  would 
have  —  they  thought  —  some  —  claret ;  and 
ended  (after  a  carefully  disguised  consulta- 
tion on  the  subject  of  finances)  by  ordering 
a  bottle  of  a  vintage  that  the  old  man  com- 
mended in  words  as  glowing  as  itself,  and 
that  cost  (he  somehow^  made  the  statement 
do  duty  at  once  as  an  apology  and  a  diagno- 
sis) six  dollars  the  quart. 

Ah !  what  a  wine  that  was !  One  at  least 
of  those  seekers  after  the  unknown  has  since 
sampled  many  vintages  in  many  lands;  but 
never,  since  that  old  white-haired  gentleman 
of  France  presented  that  dusty  bottle,  and 
wiped  its  lip  with  a  sacrificial  napkin,  has 
authentic  nectar  passed  his  lips! 

146 


An  Oriental  Bit  —  First  Baptist  Church  at  jgth  Street 


_  _  _ l4  ' 


•  .'t'l.ti^. 


i 


.[[vt     'f?i^^ 


.,t-fr,^/ 


BROADWAY 
Well,  the  meal  was  eaten  and  the  wine 
was  drunk  and  the  attentive  host,  with  a 
<'L'addition,  Messieurs?  Bien,  Messieurs," 
placed  a  slip  of  paper  on  the  table  before  the 
feasters.  One  of  them  read  it,  looked  puzzled, 
flushed  crimson,  and  passed  it  to  his  friend. 
He  read  it,  looked  puzzled,  flushed  crimson, 
and  passed  it  back.    It  read  as  follows :  — 

Two  lunches  @  $1.00      $2.00 
One  Bd.  Claret  .75 


$2.75 


I  'm  not  certain,  but  I  believe  that  expla- 
nations were  demanded  by  youthful  dignity, 
offended  and  up  in  arms;  explanations  that 
the  kindly  smile  in  those  keen  old  eyes 
should  have  rendered  needless.  I  know  at 
any  rate  that  it  was  years  before  the  recol- 
lection of  that  denouement  ceased  to  have  a 

149 


BROADWAY 
sting  and  became,  as  it  deserved,  a  happy 
and  revealing  memory.  But  that  was  long 
ago.  Since  then  I  have  many  times,  in  spirit, 
made  reparation  and  apology.  And  when, 
as  sometimes  happens,  I  dine  at  the  latest 
gold-and-crystal  Valhalla  on  Broadway 
(where  perhaps  Ba'tis'  Michell  —  not  yet, 
alas,  one  of  my  acquaintances  —  may  be  the 
cook),  I  think  of  that  old  Frenchman  as  I 
look  about  me  at  the  feasters  and  I  know 
that  Broadway  is  not  a  robber  of  the  guile- 
less and  a  passer-off  of  spurious  wares  upon 
the  unwary.  It  is  smilingly  giving  to  its 
children  glimpses  of  their  hearts'  desires. 
Only  it  is  wiser  in  its  generation  than  the  old 
Frenchman.  It  does  not  give  its  trick  away. 
It  charges  them  for  what  they  think  they  get. 


The  i;^5th  Street  End  of  the  '■'■Dip"  starting  at  1 20th  Street 


X 


W  I 


»rt 


X 

IN  the  heart  of  a  mountain  forest  (from  a 
convenient  crotch  in  a  big  pine  tree)  I 
once  saw  a  huge  grizzly  saunter  majestically 
along  a  dim  path  in  the  dusk. 

I  was  a  good  twenty  feet  from  the  ground 
and  the  wind  blew  my  scent  too  high  over 
his  head  for  my  nearness  to  alarm  him  by 
apprising  his  alert  nostrils  of  my  presence. 
At  the  same  time  my  elevation  enabled  me 
to  see,  approaching  along  the  converging  line 
of  a  well-marked  trail,  a  younger  bear  of  a 
decidedly  cocky  cast  of  countenance  and  evi- 
dently out  for  an  evening's  pleasure. 

They  met  at  the  junction  and  the  younger 
animal,  evidently  thinking  that  he  had  the 
right  of  way,  attempted  —  with  a  friendly  air 

153 


BROADWAY 

that  seemed  to  say,  '*  Why,  hello,  grandpa ! " 
—  to  share  the  going  with  the  intruder.  But 
the  latter,  while  never  for  a  moment  abating 
his  dignity,  and  never,  so  far  as  I  could  see, 
breaking  his  even  and  deliberate  stride,  raised 
a  lightning-quick  forepaw,  gave  a  short,  rau- 
cous growl,  and  went  on  his  even  way — alone. 
If  you  follow  up  Broadway  from  where  it 
starts  a  garden  at  Columbus  Circle ;  past  its 
noisy  crossing  of  Columbus  Avenue  at  Sixty- 
sixth  Street ;  past  the  little  subway  kiosk  and 
the  towering  hotel  turrets  at  Seventy-second 
Street ;  past  where  it  finally  abandons  its  fad 
for  the  automobile  business  at  Eighty-sixth 
Street ;  up  a  hill  to  Ninety-second  Street  and 
down  to  the  "  bench  "  below,  you  will  come 
to  where  the  little  village  of  Bloomingdale 
once  stood  and  to  where,  at  One  Hunch'ed 
Third  Street,  the  Bloomingdale  Road,  hav- 

154 


At  lOph  Street 


k^^'fh 


BROADWAY 

ing  fulfilled  its  mission,  came  to  peaceful 
end. 

The  resting-place  of  both  is  marked  by 
little  epitaphs  on  the  near-by  lamp-posts 
which  read  "  Bloomingdale  Square." 

Here,  too,  from  the  south,  young  West 
End  Avenue  runs  in,  lined  with  perky  resi- 
dences and  innocently  bent  upon  its  youthful 
business.  But  you  will  search  for  it  in  vain 
toward  the  north.  Bloomingdale  Square  is 
where  cocky  little  West  End  Avenue  met 
Grandpa  Bear. 

There  are  a  few  blocks  in  the  One  Hundred 
Thirties  and  Forties  where  it  looks  as  though 
Broadway  had  once  paused  to  dream  a  bour- 
geois dream.  It  had,  perhaps,  a  momentary 
notion  of  giving  over  its  gay  bachelor  exist- 
ence and  becoming,  in  an  unobtrusive  way,  a 
householder;  of  marrying  and  settling  down. 

157 


BROADWAY 

It  built  itself  some  rows  of  six-story  brown- 
stone  flats,  opened  drug  stores  at  convenient 
corners,  induced  greengrocers  and  delicates- 
sen gentlemen  to  come  and  minister  to  its 
needs,  and  prepared  to  cultivate  domesticity 
and  raise  a  family. 

But  it  soon  tired  of  the  experiment.  Pos- 
sibly it  was  only  the  indulgence  of  a  passing 
weariness.  Possibly,  as  the  art  critics  say  of 
similar  technical  divagations  on  the  part  of 
their  heroes,  it  simply  "  fell,  for  a  time,  under 
the  influence  of  Amsterdam  Avenue." 

At  any  rate,  this  half-mile  of  home-spun 
lies  along  its  hilltop,  a  peaceful  point  of  vantage 
from  which  to  look  back  upon  the  splendid 
burst  of  energy  that  carried  the  great  high- 
way from  Cathedral  Heights  and  the  clus- 
tered domes  of  Columbia  University,  down, 
down,  down,  to  the  river  level  of  Manhattan 

158 


The  Park  on  Bj-oadiuay  at  lo6th  Street 


•vyt,'r-'* 


^^p^--^^ 


\\^y. 


}^]i 


"^ 


*^, 


■>>1»^ 


\r^. 


BROADWAY 
Street,  and  up,  up,  up,  the  slope  beyond.  It 
offers,  too,  a  convenient  criterion  of  contrast 
by  which  to  judge  the  joy  of  recovered  free- 
dom with  which  Broadway  goes  galumphing 
downhill  and  up  again  toward  the  open  ;  shak- 
ing itself  as  it  goes  and  tossing  up  huge  piles 
of  big  apartments  for  the  pure  love  of  using 
surplus  energy. 

They  say  it  ends  at  Albany. 

But  let  us  no  longer  suffer  from  the  pur- 
blindness  of  ancestral  habit.  Broadway  occa- 
sionally lies  low,  like  Brer'  Rabbit.  But  it 
never  ends.  Albany?  Why,  I  myself  know  a 
place  in  Minnesota  where  it  crops  out  for  a 
mile  or  so.  And  I  once  landed  for  a  few  hours 
on  the  beach  of  an  Alaskan  fiord  where  two 
weeks  before,  so  I  was  assured  by  the  oldest 
inhabitant  of  the  city  that  I  found  there, 
nothing  but  untrodden  tundra  and  desolation 

161 


BROADWAY 

was  to  be  seen.  At  the  moment,  however, 
there  were  a  frame  gambling  resort,  a  hotel 
like  a  gospel  tent,  and  over  two  thousand  in- 
habitants living  under  canvas  and  dreaming 
golden  dreams.  The  hotel  stood  on  a  corner 
and  displayed  a  sign  that  read 

ALL  DRINKS   ONE  DOLLAR 

In  front  of  it  stood  a  lamp-post  with  a  half- 
burned  candle  in  its  lantern.  And  under  the 
lantern  two  box-slats  had  been  nailed  cross- 
wise.  And  on  one  was  painted 

TWENTY-THIRD   STREET 

and  on  the  other  was  painted 

BROADWAY 

Albany  ?  Nonsense  !    The  last  time  I  saw 
it  Broadway  was  headed  for  the  Pole. 


A  Castle  betiveen  Broadway  and  the  Hudson  —  ^^jd  Street 


XI 


"  :.^' 


XI 

THERE  is  a  widespread  notion  that  in  the 
matter  of  a  man's  age  there  is  no  going 
back  of  his  birth-certificate.  But  no  observ- 
ant person  who  has  ever  been  made  to  feel 
his  own  ignorant  immaturity  by  looking  into 
the  wise,  patient,  disillusioned  eyes  of  some 
babies,  or  who  has  had  his  own  premature 
senility  brought  home  to  him  by  the  child- 
like joy  and  trustfulness  in  some  octogena- 
rian faces,  really  takes  any  great  stock  in 
this  popular  superstition. 

Indeed,  that  very  public,  which  insists 
upon  holding  other  people  to  their  birth-cer- 
tificates, is  individually  given  to  declaring  on 
occasion  that  *' a  man  is  as  old  as  he  feels." 
Some  poetic  philosopher  puts  it  that  **  age  is 

165 


BROADWAY 
measured  by  our  lost  ideals  and  not  by  the 
flight  of  time."  And  even  the  physiologist, 
translating  the  proletarian's  horse  sense  and 
the  poet's  rhapsody  into  his  own  language, 
declares  that  "  a  man  is  as  old  as  his  arte- 
ries." 

It  is  the  same  with  communities.  I  call  to 
mind  a  village  of  some  two  hundred  inhabi- 
tants—  a  very  baby  of  a  village,  judged  by 
the  date  on  its  certificate  of  incorporation  — 
that  was  born  and  baptized  some  sixty  years 
ago  when  its  home  State  was  a  young  mother 
proud  of  many  such  children.  Great  things 
were  prophesied  for  it  when  it  should  grow 
up  and  become  a  city.  Its  streets  were  laid 
out  one  hundred  feet  wide.  Hills  guarded 
and  beautified  it.  A  stream  circled  it  and 
ran  its  mills.  It  had  a  red-brick  school,  pretty 
houses  bowered  in  pines,  a  smithy,  a  Ma- 

166 


A  Suggestion  of  Spain  from  logth  Street 


BROADWAY 
sonic  Hall,  a  stage-line,  two  stores,  and  a 
future. 

But  when  the  railroads  arrived,  they  passed 
it  by  on  either  side;  and  when  the  Civil 
War  came,  it  called  all  its  men  to  the  front 
and  sent  most  of  them  back  with  pensions. 
And  now,  for  forty  years,  these  grizzling 
veterans  have  foregathered  daily  at  that  one 
of  the  two  stores  that  happened  to  be  the 
Post-Office,  while  their  wives  milked  the  cows 
and  hoed  the  gardens.  And  the  hundred- 
foot- wide  arteries  of  the  trade  that  was  to  be 
have  hardened  until  the  building  of  a  chicken 
coop  calls  for  (and  receives)  the  presence 
and  encouragement  of  every  red  corpuscle 
in  the  community. 

By  rights  that  village  ought  to  be  teeth- 
ing. As  a  matter  of  biological  fact,  it  is  ossi- 
fied with  old  age. 

169 


BROADWAY 

It  is  therefore  evident  that  the  age  of  New 
York  is  not  only  a  determining  factor  in  its 
character,  but  is  not  necessarily  a  matter  of 
chronology.  The  parish  register  gives  its 
birthday  as  May  26,  1626.  Any  competent 
physician  who  notes  the  unimpaired  elasticity 
of  its  femoral  artery,  the  unhesitating  ease 
with  which  the  half-worn  cells  of  its  retain- 
ing walls  are  replaced,  and  new^  tissues  sup- 
plied at  need,  will  certify  that  it  is  under 
thirty.  Let  us  see  if  we  cannot  get  a  line  of 
our  own  on  this  interesting  question. 

A  few  years  ago,  in  excavating  for  the 
foundations  of  the  Bowling  Green  Offices, 
which  occupy  the  lots  numbered  from  five 
to  eleven  Broadway,  the  w^orkmen  uncov- 
ered what  experts  and  antiquarians  declared 
to  be  a  part  of  the  wooden  palisade  that  had 
protected  the  rear  of  the  Dutch  fort  of  New 

170 


Doctor  Mulvey's  Dog  and  Cat  Hospital — J  Re  lie  ^ 
at  Cathedral  Parkway 


-^'5^^  it<- 


*;V^ 


BROADWAY 
Amsterdam.  Experts  have,  before  now,  been 
known  to  err  in  diagnosis  and  even  antiqua- 
rians are  human;  so  that  doubtless  the  most 
prudent  thing  to  do  in  the  matter  of  this  ex- 
humed fence  is,  metaphorically  speaking,  to 
sit  on  it.  But  its  alleged  discovery  has  a 
bearing,  not  at  all  archaeological,  on  the  age 
of  Broadway. 

The  fact  of  the  discovery  was  rather  widely 
noted  by  the  press.  Yet  to  the  average  New 
Yorker,  who  saw  it  mentioned  in  his  morn- 
ing paper,  and  to  whom  a  reported  discov- 
ery of  Roman  relics  in  the  sub-soil  of  the 
Strand,  or  of  the  body  of  another  Pharaoh  in 
the  sands  of  Egypt  would  have  seemed  but 
a  commonplace  of  historical  continuity,  this 
reported  survival  of  a  few  posts  and  palings 
from  the  nearby  time  of  Dutch  highboys  and 
Jacobean  furniture  either  looked  like  a  bare- 

173 


BROADWAY 
faced  attempt  to  materialize  a  legend  —  like 
claiming,  let  us  say,  to  discover  in  the  Roman 
Forum  the  bones  of  the  wolf  that  suckled 
Romulus,  —  or  else  appeared  to  relate  itself 
to  the  timeless  eras  of  geology. 

In  short,  it  was  like  showing  a  bit  of  his 
own  baby-clothes  to  a  youth  of  twenty-one ; 
to  whom  his  great  grandmother's  sampler 
appears  a  mildly  interesting  and  perfectly 
normal  family  possession,  but  to  whom  a 
three-inch  red-leather  shoe  in  connection  with 
himself  is  either  incredible  or  antediluvian. 

All  of  us  who  have  gotten  over  being 
twenty-one,  and  have  preserved  any  recol- 
lection of  what  the  experience  was  like,  re- 
member that  it  was  a  time  when  the  Future, 
about  which  wc  had  been  openly  curious  and 
secretly  a  trifle  afraid,  became  suddenly  neg- 
ligible on  account  of  our  new-found  and  com- 

174 


Looking  across  the  Hudsoti  from  Broadway  at  1 1 6th  Street 


BROADWAY 

plete  self-confidence  in  regard  to  it.  Also  that 
it  was  a  time  when  our  childhood  (an  indis- 
cretion that  we  had  never  quite  lived  down ) 
all  at  once  receded  into  an  unplumbable 
abysm  of  antiquity.  Also  that  it  was  a  time 
when,  finding  that  the  blundering  old  fogey- 
ism  of  our  elders  had  somehow  clarified  into 
wisdom  in  our  own  noddles,  we  were  glori- 
ously enabled  to  forge  along,  deep  wrapped 
in  the  supreme  interest  of  to-day,  letting  yes- 
terday go  hang  and  to-morrow  look  out  for 
itself.  It  was  a  time  when  we  expected,  pres- 
ently, to  reform  the  world,  and,  meanwhile, 
took  our  own  shortcomings  lightly.  It  was  a 
time  when  we  looked  disdainfully  upon  the 
amenities  of  life,  yet  carried  our  heads  high 
and  parted  our  hair  carefully  in  the  middle. 
It  was  a  time  when  we  did  crude  things 
boastfully  and  fine  things  without  thought. 

177 


BROADWAY 

How  shall  we  understand  Broadway  (or 
the  city  that  it  bisects  or  the  nation  that  it 
epitomizes)  if  we  do  not,  remembering  these 
things,  see  that  for  all  its  three  hundred  years 
of  history  it  is  just  turned  twenty-one? 

They  tell  us  that  the  world  is  old  and  that 
Great  Pan  is  dead.  Do  not  you  believe  them. 
The  world  is  still  fecund.  And  Pan  is  not 
dead ;  he  has  merely  moved  to  town.  It  is 
true  that  out  in  the  country,  these  days,  there 
is  no  one  left  but  a  few  dryads  and  an  occa- 
sional satyr.  But  if,  along  Broadway,  you 
will  watch  warily  among  the  crowds,  some 
day  you  will  see  a  footprint  that  you  do  not 
know.  Look  at  it  as  a  Mussulman  looks  upon 
the  sandal  of  Mahomet.  It  is  as  near  as  you 
will  ever  come  to  seeing  Pan-America,  the 
lustiest  of  the  younger  gods. 


Columbia  College  from  Broachuay 


f  ^^^Mc){^^'^'^ 


Off  to  Albany 


XII 


XII 

EVEN  on  the  clearest  night  in  summer,  if 
you  stand  on  the  corner  of  Broadway 
and  Forty-second  Street  it  is  imjDossible  to 
see  the  stars. 

May  it  not  be  salutary  for  us  to  remember, 
at  times,  that  Broadway  itself  is  probably  in- 
visible to,  say,  the  keenest  observers  on  the 
satellites  of  Sirius  ? 

Mr.  Chesterton,  who  is  fond  of  exploding 
bits  of  unexpected  truths  so  that  they  sound 
like  hyperbolic  blank  cartridges,  has  said 
somewhere  that  in  all  the  relations  of  life,  the 
only  thing  that  really  matters  is  a  man's  atti- 
tude toward  the  cosmos. 

A  pale-faced  man,  stretched  on  a  cot  in  one 

183 


BROADWAY 

of  the  city  hospitals,  to  whom  the  chaplain  of 
the  ward  had  just  been  speaking,  once  said 
to  me,  "You  can  say  what  you  like,  but 
heaven  is  a  long  way  from  Broadway." 

On  the  other  hand,  a  certain  citizen  of 
Gotham  died  and  was  buried. 

And,  at  first,  when  he  came  confusedly 
to  himself,  his  senses  were  obfuscated  with 
the  notion  that  he  must,  once  again,  have  been 
making  a  night  of  it. 

But  when  the  eyes  of  his  spirit  began  to 
clear,  he  saw  that  he  was  in  a  strange  country. 
And  as  he  looked  about  him  his  gaze  fell  upon 
an  open  doorway.  And  within  he  saw  a  Being, 
surrounded  by  strange  instruments,  gazing 
into  what  might  have  been  a  microscope. 

And  he  said  to  the  Being,  "  What  are  you 
doing? " 

And  the  Being  answered,  "I  am  seeking." 
184 


A  Relic  of  Old  Broadzvay  near  igzd  Street 


-ri^ 


BROADWAY 

And  he  said,"  For  what  ?" 

And  the  Being  answered,  "  God  knows." 

And  when  the  newcomer  had  thought  on 
this  for  a  moment  he  said,  "  Why,  then,  do 
you  seek  ? " 

And  the  Being  answ^ered,  **  There  is  no- 
thing else  to  do." 

At  that  the  stranger  made  bold  to  enter 
the  doorway  and  to  ask,  less  hesitatingly, 
*♦  What  are  you  looking  at  ? " 

And  the  Being  answered,  "  At  a  drop  of 
juice  from  the  body  of  a  bug." 

And  he  asked,  <*  Is  it  a  rare  bug?" 

And  the  Being  answered,  "Its  numbers 
are  a  pest." 

And  he  asked,  "  Where  did  you  get  it?" 

And  the  Being  answered,  "  From  the  stalk 
of  a  weed  in  my  kitchen-garden."  And  he 
added,  '*Come  and  look." 

187 


BROADWAY 

And  when  the  stranger  had  looked  into 
the  lens,  he  saw  the  sun  and  the  stars  and 
all  the  uncounted  orbs  of  heaven,  very  small 
and  scarcely  to  be  made  out,  moving  in  a 
crystal  liquor.  And,  bewildered,  he  asked, 
"What  is  it?" 

And  the  Being  answered,  "  The  leuco- 
cytes in  the  blood  of  the  bug." 

And  the  newcomer,  when  he  had  looked 
again  into  the  lens,  raised  his  head  and  said, 
in  an  awe-stricken  voice,  "Are  you,  then, — 
GOD?" 

And  the  Being  laughed  outright  and  said, 
*T  am  but  a  poor  Being  like  the  rest  of  my 
race,  who  knows  not  whence  he  came,  or 
whither  he  is  going,  or  if  God  lives." 

And  when  he  had  pondered  this,  he  that 
had  been  a  citizen  of  Gotham  said  to  himself, 
"  If  these  things  be  so ;  if  the  earth  and  her 

188 


The  '■^Frankfurter  Man  " 


-i^^ 


BROADWAY 

sister-planets,  the  sun,  the  dog  star  and  their 
myriad  brothers  of  the  Milky  Way,  are  but 
corpuscles  in  the  blood  of  an  unconsidered  in- 
sect from  a  neglected  corner  of  the  kitchen- 
garden  of  a  Being  who  himself  knows  nei- 
ther whence  he  came  nor  whither  he  is  bound 
nor  if  God  lives,  is  it  not  possible  that  some- 
times, on  Broadway,  we  took  ourselves  too 
seriously?" 


THE    END 


CAMBRIDGE  .  MASSACHUSETTS 
U    .    S    .    A 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 

Los  Angeles 
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1986 


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